Suppose you’re in a foreign land and the only internet you have is a cyber cafe that considers 5 kb/sec as “broadband”. Obviously, downloading your 600 MB CD Image file is going to take you longer than a good sitting, so you need a plan. To further complicate the problem, these computers have no cd burner - but you’re lucky enough to have a single USB port and a memory stick.

Tools:

• wget for Windows - a unix http/ftp download utility ported to windows
• quiet - a freeware command line tool that spawns a process into the background (does not show up in taskbar - only processes)
• file splitter
• computer with Windows 95 or above, usb port, internet
• a USB memory stick

Once you have all these tools, you’re ready to start.

In my case, I placed all these tools in a single directory in c:\windows called “quiet”. I then created a shortcut on the desktop (right click, new shortcut). For the command line, i set it as:

C:\WINDOWS\Quiet\Quiet.exe C:\WINDOWS\Quiet\wget.exe -c http://www.website.com/DOWNLOADTHIS.ISO

The “-c” argument for wget tells it to continue. This is important in case the computer is restarted, it will resume the download. I then placed the shortcut in the Windows program files startup folder in case the computer is restarted, logged off, etc.
Of course, this trick might not work for you if they really have the computer locked down.

Return back after a few hours, use the file splitter utility to split the downloaded file into chunks to copy onto the memory stick and copy to a laptop. Piece the files back together, and enjoy

Simple, but quite handy.