I pride myself on being one that doesn’t use warez and will download from Rapidshare and Megaupload only if a Linux distro or a legal source of information is only available that way or if it’s faster that way. And seeing as sometimes, a distribution’s site is overwhelmed by people trying to download it, like Ubuntu, or has no official download anymore because it has been discontinued, like Yggdrasil Linux, it has grown to be a necessity for my connection. It is only at these times that anyone would catch me downloading from direct downloads, rather then official sites. And until recently, I was using FreeRapid because of the wide selection that it was able to download from. Then when I decided to download a copy of Debian 5.04 that was hosted on Hotfile, I was facing an dilemma: for some reason or another, when I tried downloading it, it wouldn’t work. Instead, it crashed and wouldn’t allow for any more downloads from FreeRapid. I could email the makers of FreeRapid or post on their forum, I admit, but I figured I might switch to a new application that would be quicker then to get it fixed. And it just so happens that I found one that I will be writing about today.

MiPony is a small application, weighing in at about 5 mb once installed without the toolbar but once installed, you’ll find a lot of extra features that make it more powerful then FreeRapid to make up for the lack of add-ons to download from. The first thing you might notice is the fact that it has a browser built right into it. Yes, it’s Internet Explorer based, but I’ve never seen anything like it in all the time I’ve use FreeRapid. This browser will allow for instant downloading when you click on any supported link, including Rapidshare, Mediafire, Hotfile, MegaUpload, DepositFile, Uploading, Storage.to, FileFactory, and EasyShare. It also supports Premium accounts for the above, so if you’re lucky enough to get or win one, you can use it in this application, though it does support more then 45 different sites aside from these. It also supports file joining and unraring files automatically once the downloads are done as well as putting in the passwords for the files, on top of shutting down the computer once the downloads are done. It also supports the standard FreeRapid working of monitoring the clipboard to watch for files to download. It’s options are clear and easy to use as well as making it an extremely powerful downloader application.

If you do a lot of downloading via direct links like Rapidshare and Megaupload, I would still recommend FreeRapid over any other, due to the fact that it works on every operating system that can run Java and it’s wide plugin base, but if you’re looking for one that is a very powerful replacement because FreeRapid somehow failed, MiPony is definitely a program to look into. MiPony needs the .NET framework to work but works on my slow laptop, so I imagine if you have a recent Windows OS, it should be able to work fine.

– MiPony Downloader – (5 mb)