I'm all excited because VS 2008 RTM was released yesterday! I read on the MSDN site: For a faster, more reliable download experience, please utilize “Top Downloads” below. All English Visual Studio 2008 editions will be available here first.
Faster, yes, unless you count the fact that it's unreliable! 6 hours into the download and 99% complete and I get a message about a persistent network failure and make sure I'm connected to the internet before continuing. I thought that maybe I had done something to break my connection, so I verify it and then click on yes to continue after which I get a fatal error. And then the stupid download manager goes into a state where you CAN'T CONTINUE DOWNLOADING!! A download manager FORCES you to start your stupid download over! Isn't that the whole point of the download manager?? It's so dumb that even if you go to the same url, click on the same link, start the same download and have a file that is 99% of the way finished in the same location that you choose to save the file, it just happily starts from the very beginning, forcing you to download all 3.1 GB again! ARGH!!
So I try the end run with a real download manager, but no luck. This has happened to me twice already, so I'm really kinda irritated.
Update 11-21-07 Try number 6 and still no luck. I only get 155 KB/sec, so it's like they've got a session timeout set and I miss it by about 10 minutes every time. I've made it to 98% and 99% several times. Others who have faster connections than I do haven't had problems. What a crock.