Downloading VS 2008 from Dreamspark over multiple sessions

Downloading VS 2008 from Dreamspark over multiple sessions

Courtesy of Microsoft Dreamspark, I now have a valid license for Visual Studio 2008 Professional. However, it is a 3GB+ download, and my connection has a 1 meg speed. I can't leave anything long enough to download it all in one go, and resuming the download (with either the on-site download manager (won't resume on IE8, won't even start on Firefox 3), or firefox's native downloads) doesn't work. Which leaves me with a license, but no program.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 167

Total answers/comments: 2

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"I quote from an article by the University of Texas: ""Microsoft DreamSpark - Purchasing"", which says towards the end:

Click the Download button marked
Download Manager.

On campus — Periodically use the Pause
button to suspend your download to
ensure that you do not use your entire
bandwidth quota. When paused, you can
use the Exit button to quit the
Download Manager. The Download Manager
will place a link on your desktop that
you can use to resume your download.

I'm not a user of DreamSpark, so I don't know which Download Manager is referred here. But I suggest that you access the site via internet explorer, to let Microsoft use its own download manager, and try out if the Pause/Exit mechanism that is suggested here does work for you. If it does, use it periodically.

Edit: Found this:

If you RESUME the download using the
icon on your desktop, it's likely to
FAIL and DESTROY the part of the file
you've already got... But if you go
back to DreamSpark and download the
SAME FILE AGAIN rather than using the
desktop link it appears to resume OK."

Guest [Entry]

"Had the exact same problem 1 yr ago. It almost seemed like Microsoft's servers don't support resume at all and it kept timing out on me. Only way I could get around it was finding the fastest possible wired internet connection (my school, of course) and d/l there. Heh, since I couldn't transfer the ISO from school computers (no DVD burner, too big for my flash drive, no shared dir) I had to unplug a machine in the lab, spoof the MAC address and assign the matching static IP on my laptop to fool the router.

Are you remote from your campus or something?"