Neither the download managers that come bundled with Firefox or IE are particularly impressive so it's a good idea to add a third party downloader or plugin, like Fresh Download.

Fresh Download claims it can "turbo charge" downloads to make them download in less than half the time they would normally. Fresh Download is a program that works with both FTP and HTTP protocols and gives you a whole range of control over how downloads are completed. Included is a pause and resume feature which is very useful for broken downloads or those downloads that suddenly and annoyingly time out. Fresh Download achieves such high speeds due to its ability to connect to multiple connections and it works across most major browsers. If you don't want to carry out downloads immediately, you can also schedule them on Fresh Download for a later date and it can even download links that you've copied to your clipboard or dragged into the main interface from your desktop. If you're downloading zip files, Fresh Download can also decompress them automatically with it's own Zip extractor although note that it's not particularly powerful or fast - you'd be better using WinZip or WinRAR.

Although you won't notice huge download speeds, you will notice an improvement and besides, this is a much easier way to manage downloads.

Download Fresh Download 8.73 in Softonic

JZip is a complete platform for handling compressed files. In addition to compressing and decompressing, it allows the user to choose how much space to save, preview files and protect them with a password.

Another function that has become critical in this type of program is the integration into Windows Explorer allowing navigate within compressed files. In short, this is a program that has the functions most commonly used in a compressor, without advanced options which sometimes only serve to recharge the interface and confuse users with less experience. The developers claim that it is jZip is built on proven and reliable 7-Zip technology. 7-Zip technology is basically very fast and achieves compression ratios that the developers claim are higher or equivalent to other leading compression programs. jZip is fully compatible with all your current Zip, RAR, 7z and many other formats so if you're looking for a change, this may well be it.

Fast, free and reliable, if you're sick of WinZip asking you for money or don't like WinRAR, this is a superb free solution.

Download jZip 1.3 in Softonic

How many times, for instance, have you tried to send a movie clip to a friend only for the email to bounce back due to size restrictions imposed by the service provider? Usually in this case we turn to our old friends WinZip or WinRAR, but believe it or not, WinUHA produces smaller file sizes than these popular tools.

WinUHA provides a graphical interface for UHARC, a command-line application, which is proven to have the best compression ratio around, achieving rates of 10-20 percent better than RAR or ZIP. The original version is very slow and has no graphical interface, which prompted this developer to open up the format to the public at large.

WinUHA doesn’t do a bad job either, operating in a very similar way to WinZip and, aside from an annoying donation screen, allows you to get down to business pretty quickly, adding files to the archive with a single click or by dragging them into the clearly laid-out directory window.

Once you’ve clicked to compress the selected files you start to realize the power of the UHARC format. We were very impressed that WinUHA managed to shrink down files of 11.1Mb down to 7.1Mb, compared to 9Mb when we performed the same operation in WinZip.

However, this high compression ratio comes at a cost – the speed. There’s no doubt that compressing with WinUHA is significantly slower than its major rivals, and unlike WinZip, you don’t get the option of tweaking the compression ratio to speed things up.

There’s not much else more WinUHA than the simple process of compressing and decompressing files and you won’t find many other options, other than basic settings for changing the interface.

The high compression ratios provided by WinUHA should come in handy for sending email attachments, and as the size of the files you archive increases, you'll start to notice the its real benefit.

Download WinUHA 2.0 RC1 in Softonic