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Ultimate Beginners Guide To Download Anything For Free From File Hosts
Learn How To Download Anything Online For Free.
Torrents and Peer-2-Peer software mainly used to download movies, tv shows, music, games and pirated software all illegally have started losing popularity dramatically over past few years thanks to newly emerging free file hosting websites such as Rapidshare, MediaFire, MegaUpload, 4Shared, Easy Share and FileFactory to name a few.
Why Are File Hosting Services More Popular?
I believe one of the crucial factors in these services success is the simplicity it brings, you don’t have to download any bittorrent software, find torrent search engines, worry about looking for files with lots of seeds, having to upload at the same time you download or mess around with the settings till you get a decent speed…sharing files through file hosting services is simply a matter of copy and pasting a bunch of links and downloading directly from their servers.
Anything that’s to good to be true usually is…the downsides of using these services is the limited features you have without paying for a membership, the servers to download are sometimes full or slow, and after downloading a certain amount of megabytes you are given a “time out” and must wait a few minutes or hours depending on the site.There are many ways to bypass all these download limits and time outs and I’ll go more into that later on.
Where To Find The Files Your Looking For.
Searching for files to download through file sharing websites is a lot easier than searching for fast working torrents.There’s three main methods you can find the files your looking for, once you find them, copy and paste the links on a notepad deleting the downloaded parts so you don’t get mixed up:
Method One: Direct Downloads
This is my favorite method because it’s the most efficient of them all (with the method below you sometimes encounter missing or password protected files), there are thousands of websites out there dedicated to finding uploaded files and posting the links for you to download, if the zip file is password protected they usually post the password to unzip it together with the links.After a few years of downloading content this way I started helping out in a few sites and that helped me get to know which ones are the best.Some of the following sites may require you to register a free account but will most likely have any file your looking for , I have also scanned them for harmful scripts or popups that warez sites tend to have, all these are clean:
- Warez-BB.org
- RapidShareFilms.com
- ForumW.org
- KatzForums.com
- FreshWap.net
- AliveDownload.com
- TinyDL.com
Method Two: Search Engines
The alternative to downloading from the above sites, blogs and forums is using a file sharing search engine, they are search engines similar Google dedicated to scanning the internet for file sharing links and logging them in their database, the only problem with this is that sometimes the files are password protected or it’s missing one of the split file parts (I’ll go more into that later) so you end up downloading it all for nothing.There are quite a few search engines out there but not many have decent size file databases, the following are the cream of the crop:
- Rapidshare-Search-Engine.com
- FilesTube.com
- OneClickFiles.com
- ShareMiner.com
- MegaDownload.net
- RapidShare1.com
- Filez.com
Method Three: Google
Google now days can be used to search for just about anything you can think of, instead of using the sites suggested in method one you can find your own links by doing quick google searches with queries such as “movie-name rapidshare download” or “moviename megaupload dvdrip” ect…, eg query: “The Godfather rapidshare download“. The only problem I find with this is that many of the sites that come up in the search results contain adware or spyware that can infect your computer…nothing really serious but it could cause some slowdowns or invasion of privacy, I strongly suggest you use Firefox Web Browser and some of the security plugins I recommended in this article.
TIP: Most of the sites you will come across are either blogs or forums, with blogs your usually fine cause they don’t require registration but some forum webmasters are sneaky and hide the file sharing links so they are only viewable by Registered users forcing you to sign up.A cool little trick I learned to bypass some of those forums is to go back to the search results page and use the “Cached” option in the google search results (it’s under the websites description next to the url of the website).Forums restrict viewing of these links to peoples IP addresses but they don’t restrict it to the google server as they need to allow google to view the links so they can get indexed in the search results…that’s why you can view them through Google’s ‘Cached’.
How To Download The Files And Bypass The Limits
Now that you know what file sharing websites are and where you can find the links to the files you want to download we arrive at the downloading part.It’s getting harder and harder to trick sites like rapidshare thanks to their always up to date security patches and upgrades, however there’s a few tools you might find useful.
- CryptLoad: CryptLoad is the download-manager of the future when it comes to downloading from file hosts, it has the best features of all the known download managers and provides direct downloading of crypted links like they come from rapidshare and others. The advantage of CL is that it bypasses download limit restrictions for many file sharing websites.Some antivirus detect it as a trojan…mine did, but it’s actually a ‘false positive’ meaning it uses some codes that resemble to a trojan (it needs those codes to send crypted connections to the file sites and download the file anonymously without letting the restrictions stop it) but it’s very much clean and safe.
- UltraSurf: UltraSurf is an anonymous browsing software you can use to hide your real IP and use a proxy IP provided by the softwares proxy network.This can be used to bypass the limited amount of downloads per IP per hour filtered by the file hosts.Click here to find out more about it and what other useful things you can use it on.
- Orbit Downloader: Orbit Downloader is simpler not so efficient alternative to cryptload, it’s another download manager used to accelerate the download speed of your files by breaking it into different sections and downloading them individually then joining them up when completed.As you can imagine this takes a lot of resources from the website hosting the files and that’s why they only allow premium users to use download managers on many file sharing websites.There’s better download managers out there but this one allows you to download from MegaUpload if for some reason you can’t use Cryptload.It also downloads files from Youtube, Imeem ect…
TIP: You might also want to read the How To Bypass Rapidshare Restrictions article for some other simple methods that don’t require to download any software.
How To Open The Downloaded Files
File sharing websites have a 100 megabyte size limit for the files it hosts for free and more for premium user files, since the files you’ll be interested in downloading will most likely exceed this size limit, the file uploaders use compression applications (zipping) to split the files in several ‘parts’ (in movies for example it’s 7 parts for normal quality and 15 for high quality video files) and also compress them so it reduces the size a bit.To open these files (usually in .zip or .rar format) you will need a File Compression Tool, there’s a few free ones to choose from and a couple of excellent pay ones, here’s my suggestions for this type of task:
- WinRAR: WinRAR is a powerful file compression and decompression tool that’s been around since 1993. It supports a wide range of formats and is also one of the few archivers capable of writing RAR archives (zipping up your own rar files).Winrar isn’t free and costs an expensive $US29 for a single license, of course you can use it for free and put up with a few advertisement screens in between usage OR ironically, you can search for a ‘cracked’ version of it downloadable from rapidshare hehe, eg, google search: ‘winrar latest version cracked rapidshare‘.
- IZArc: IZArc is a full featured FREE file compression/archiving tool that you can use to open and create compressed files in many different formats. It offers many advanced features, including repairing of broken archives, searching within archives, password protecting, emailing of archives and much more.I’m not going to bore you with all the features it has or file formats it supports, I’ll just tell you it’s the best of the best when it comes to free file compression tools and you’ll find out why when you start using it.
- The Unarchiver: Let me start by apologizing, I haven’t been fair to my Mac OS X readers lately and left them out from a few of my guides, I did a little research to find you guys the best freeware file compression tool for your underrated operating system.The Unarchiver is the built-in default file compression utility for Mac OS X. Unlike Windows, which only supports the ZIP format out-of-the-box, The Unarchiver handles most major formats.The small catch is that it’s a read-only application, meaning if you want to write (create/make) your own zip files you will need to find an extra addon application for it, but for our simple file opening task, it’s more than enough.
TIP: Some of the people who upload the files use passwords to compress them, always pay attention when copying a list of links if the files have a password, it’s usually at the end of the list of links but sometimes they post them at the beginning.If your unlucky enough to have downloaded all parts of a file just to find the file is password protected and you don’t remember where you got the links from or you forgot to copy one part and now its missing, simply copy and paste one of the downloaded part urls into google, eg: “http://rapidshare.com/files/14526355/filename.part1.rar.html”, 99% of the time you will find the password or file part in one of the search results.
Alert: Every now and then (rarely) you will encounter files that end with the .001, .002 ect… file type, these files have not been zipped but have been splitted up into parts with a special software.To join these file parts you will need a joining software, the easiest and fastest to use is HJSplit which is freeware and also offers versions for DOS and Linux.
How To Watch/Play/Run The Downloaded Files
We have arrived at the final part of this guide…you found the files, downloaded them successfully, extracted them from the compressed zip and now want to use them.Depending on what you have downloaded, you will need different kind of applications to make them work, the following list offers the best free applications to open almost any type of file…audio, video, pictures and games.
- VLC Media Player: VLC Media Player is the ultimate video playing utility I have used over the years, it can play practically any video format imaginable (and a few popular audio formats), it’s very light weight on your computers system resources and offers a portable version to carry around in your flash drive.
- Winamp: I’m sure many of you already know about Winamp, a wonderful audio utility with many playback options and an extremely customizable media library also allowing you to rip and burn your favorite music CDs. It offers plug-ins/skins that allow you to change the look-and-feel of the player as well as add new features.The player has access to thousands of free songs, videos and online radio stations from SHOUTcast Radio and AOL Radio with XM.
- Daemon Tools: Daemon Tools is a CD & DVD emulation software which allows users to make CD/DVD disc images, create a virtual CD / DVD drives and play CDs & DVDs without the need for the physical disc.When you download game files (and some softwares) they come encoded in a .ISO file type, to open this type of file you need to create a virtual disk (use the “Mount Image” Device option) and it will run it like a normal cd setup. I suggest you get the Lite version as you most likely won’t need the extensive features the pro version brings.
- FastStone Image Viewer:FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor that opens any type of image file. Features include image viewing, slide show, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, high quality magnifier, 150+ transition effects cropping and color adjustments with much much more.
That’s it!, you now know all the necessary tools and information you will need to live a very entertaining and software fulfilled online life, I know some of you will have troubles at first finding some of the more difficult and less known files to download, so for a limited time only (I feel like one of those infomercial ladies) I will help you out ;), post a request in the comments to the name of the file your looking for (also specify if its a movie, software ect..) and I will not link you to the file sharing site directly (as my servers don’t allow it) but, I will link you to the uploaders page where the links can be found. :)
Also Read:
- Best Of: Best Free File Compression Utilities
- Best Of: Best Free MP3 Finders
- 425 Can’t Open Data Connection
- How To:Download Free Movies,Music And Games
- How To: Bypass RapidShare Restrictions
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5 comments for “Ultimate Beginners Guide To Download Anything For Free From File Hosts”
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Hello!, Matthew is awesomely cool with tons of knowledge and lots of experience in blah blah blah ...he doesn't like writing about himself cause it always seems to come out sounding self-centered, instead he will write this in a third person which most authors do anyway...perhaps it's because it makes us sound important cause it gives the illusion someone (non biased) thinks so highly of us they took some time off their own to write this :).Read more about me here...
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I’ve been reading along for a while now. I just wanted to drop you a comment to say keep up the good work.
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thanks man
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Nice post.Downloading anything on the internet can be risky. So is the case with online bootleg movie downloads. Some websites intend to take away your money giving you poor quality movies. There are also several websites that offer good online movies. So you should be cautious while deciding which site to trust.
Online Bootleg Movie Downloads´s last blog ..Where to Get Free Movie Downloads Without Hassle
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Nice post Matthew , you covered a lot of question In one long shot. By the way for mac user they can download safari 4 it comes with safe browsing and antivirus,spyware detector and blocker. By the way I was wondering if you can help me to find a software to download free. It calls Magic Article Rewriter and Magic Article Submitter. Please let me know if so. Have a great day and again Great Post.
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