• pigduck
• Sep 29,2006
• In: Rants

Rapidshare - Is Premium Worth it?

I practically live on the internet. I have to download a lot of things because Malaysia has no entertainment of its own.

Therefore, I require the internet to keep me in contact with the world. I don’t watch pornography. I do however, like a few music artistes and they have their promotional work that goes on and I need to keep up with it. Unfortunately, nobody allows direct downloads anymore or its really rare because of bandwidth limits.

There are a few prominent services such as Yousendit, Rapidshare, Megaupload, Sendspace, etc. (I mentioned porn because apparently, people use these storage places to store porn… suckers)

For me, I use all of them but one of the sites I frequent uses Rapidshare. With Rapidshare, it used to be good and slowly, they started putting in restrictions. So they had the “one hour a file (so we would have to wait for an hour to download the next file)”, SSL encryption, countdowns, key recognition to make sure that we weren’t robots, etc.

I used to be stupid and wait for an hour to download the next file. I never thought people would come up with workarounds. So you can imagine how long it took me to download things. Bah. I would sit and wait for the time to be up to download all my media files. I can’t believe I wasted so much time!

My broadband connection deteriorated over the last few months and I start to panic because I couldn’t get my files so I started to do some research online and that’s when I discovered programs such as Universal Share Downloader and Rapget.

There are a lot of sites out there who have documented how to use these programs and how to be more efficient. There’s this and this for the programs mentioned above. Thoy teach you how to use the files.

There are some methods that people use to bypass the 1 hour limit such as restarting their modem (I do this quite a bit), others by flushing their dns and releasing and renewing their IPs. Check it out here and here and here and here on how to use these tedious methods.

Then I started reading about getting free Rapidshare Premium accounts. Apparently, Rapidshare gives away free Premium accounts every so often so we should look out for it. I don’t think these Premium accounts last forever. Maybe a day or two. I never found the point of these though. So, even if they lasted for two days, with my pathetic ADSL speeds, it would make no sense for me to obtain Rapidshare Premium Accounts. There are programs that continually look out for temporary Rapidshare Premium accounts. You can read more about it here and here.

This website gives an overview of download manager programs and search programs for Rapidshare… I think it’s quite educational. It also gives a step by step tutorial on how to beat the waiting time for Rapidshare. I’m such a geek. Hahaha.

Rapidshare is one of the top sites visited by Malaysians as indexed by Alexa. Can you believe all the time and life I missed out because I was waiting to download media files. Now I can leave it on and go out, go to bed and not worry.

Recently, these download managers were paralysed because Rapidshare changed their protocols to SSL (whatever this means…). I was crippled because I didn’t know how to sit by my computer anymore to wait to download. Plus, my ADSL hasn’t stabilised yet. So, I didn’t really download anything for weeks. I waited patiently for these Rapidshare download managers to be updated and finally, it has come. You have to include some .dll files into the WINDOWS/system 32 folders. Not sure if it’s safe but you can get it here, here or here.

I never thought Rapidshare Premium was worth it although during the last few weeks, I could feel desperation seep in because I had so many things to download and didn’t know how to sit in front of the computer and wait anymore. Of course, it would be ideal if I got Rapidshare Premium but I’d have to fork out Euros and my ADSL screams, “it’s not worth it!” I’m not sure those temporary Rapidshare Premium accounts are worth it for me. All I need is a good download manager (the ones I’ve mentioned above) that will allow me to queue the files that I want to download so that I can have a life. I don’t mind those one hour waiting times as long as I eventually get them.

What about you?