Akamai ate my 2.49Gb Vista RC2 Download

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 09 October 2006 18:32

Your IT - Entertainment

Well, with Vista RC1 going so well, and the download of RC2 nearly complete, trouble in paradise decided to pay me a visit. Obviously, it was just what I needed to bring me back to reality from my technology induced state of new OS happiness, showing that playing with betas can be just be like playing with fire: sometimes you get burnt.

What am I on about? Well, the download for Windows Vista RC2 is a not insignificant 2.49Gb. Ostensibly to protect users, their time and their download limits, Microsoft made two ways of downloading the ISO of the RC2 DVD available. The recommended way is to use the Akamai Download Manager. Click on the link and it asks to install a Java applet designed to download large files safely, letting you pause the download and re-start it as required.

The second way is to just do a direct download through your browser, but as I knew that I was downloading this onto my Tablet PC over a wireless broadband connection, the Akamai download manager was the safe, sensible option.

So off I went, merrily clicking on the Akamai download link. After the process of getting the download going, it was going to take 10 to 15 hours to download 2.49Gb. Of course if your broadband is faster, you’d get the file faster, but as I was using various wireless connections my speed was not as fast as a good cable or ADSL 2+ connection.




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