interrupted downloads

Is it my imagination or do interrupted downloads in XP not restart from the point of interruption like Win98SE did? I have had some connection problems with my dial up service this morning and have tried several times to download a file, but it always starts over. This was a very useful feature in Win98SE, is there something I need to turn on in XP to get it to do this?

 

What you mention is not a feature of any Windows OS, it's a caching feature if anything... if you are lucky Windows recognizes a cached file when you reconnect to a download site, it MAY resume it - but it's not something you should count on.

What I can recommend is getting the program FlashGet.
It is Ad-Ware - ie. it's freeware sponsored by banner ads (or you can register it, to get rid of the ads).
But what it does is to monitor your downloads, thereby allowing you full resumability, and you can set it up to download into different categories and directories.
It also attempts to create multiple connections to the server (default is 5 simultaneous connections) so any server allowing more connections per IP will increase your download speed drastically.
There's also an Opera/Netscape plugin for it allowing you to use it with other browsers.

However, the first thing that you should do after installing it is to run Ad-Aware to get rid of the spyware component that it unfortunately installs. Unlike some of the other spyware programs floating around the web FlashGet works perfectly fine with those components removed.

HTH