I use Rapidshare a lot. For some reason, it seems to be the host of choice for sharing files lately. One has to wonder why, since you have to wait anywhere from 30-120 seconds for a file if you're not a premium user and enter a captcha code (although to their credit, their captchas are usually very easy to read). The cool thing about Rapidshare though is that once you can download it's very fast, especially for a free service.

There are tricks to using Rapidshare that I've discovered, and I thought I'd share them. Many people don't know how to use the service.

I won't talk about just what you can download from Rapidshare; like the military, I have a don't ask, don't tell policy. Suffice it to say that anything your little heart could desire can be found on Rapidshare, provided you know the right people. But to get you started, I'll provide you with two links to things I've uploaded. They're both packages of free fonts that I put together for a scrapbooking group, one Calligraphy, the other Halloween/Scary (previews here and here; previews are just samples, there are more fonts in the packages). We'll use them for educational purposes.

1. http://rapidshare.de/files/26373027/Calligraphy.rar 4.80 MB
2. http://rapidshare.de/files/26138929/HalloweenScary.rar 2.79 MB

Click one of the links. You'll be taken to a kind of confusing page. About halfway down you should see something that says "You want to download Calligraphy.rar" followed by a table outlining the differences between Premium and free downloads. At the bottom of this table you'll see two buttons, one says Premium and the other says free. You want to click the free button. From there you are taken to another cluttered page where it tells you that your Download-ticket has been reserved and asks you to "Please wait __ seconds". While you wait for the timer to count down feel free to amuse yourself by figuring out how many American dollars you'd have to spend to equal the 9.90 euros that they charge for one month of Premium usage. Yeah, it's a lot. By now, your timer will have stopped and you should see a captcha. Enter the code, click the button and your download should start. As a free user, you're limited to downloading 50 MB per hour (I think) so you should be able to download both the above files if you want.

You can also be on the lookout for a free Premium account. Once in a while Rapidshare spreads the love and gives away Premium accounts that are good for 2 days. Two days of instant downloads, no waiting, no limits, no captchas. The trick is that when taken to a Rapidshare page, look for the golden crown. If you see it, that means they're giving away Premium accounts. If you don't want to keep visiting Rapidshare to check if they're giving away Premium accounts you can download a little program called RapidCheck. It sits in your system tray and will notify you when free Premium accounts become available on Rapidshare.

Ok, but this is a major hassle you say. What if you have ten Rapidshare links you want to download? You don't have time to wait around for timers and captchas or to have to wait another hour to be able to download again. That's where RapGet comes in. RapGet allows you to download from Rapidshare (and several other free filehosting services) without the hassle. You enter your Rapidshare links, and the program does all the work for you. It'll enter the codes for you, wait the allotted amount of time, even wait an hour if you're download limit has been reached. I like to enter a crapload of links into it and then go to work or leave it on all night and when I come back, everything's downloaded. A tip though, when you first download and install RapGet, go to the settings and click on the Connection tab. You'll see something that says Bandwidth, Kb (0-unlim.) and then a box with a zero in it. I don't know why it's set to zero by default, because that won't work. You have to give RapGet some bandwidth to work with or it won't be able to download anything. So enter a number commensurate with your download speed (see yesterday's post to find out what your download speed is). I entered 800. I could have entered a much higher number, but I still like to be able to surf and check my email while RapGet is downloading, so 800 is good.

So there it is. Everything you need to know about downloading from Rapidshare. Happy downloading!

Categories: How-To, Software