WinWGet Portable

Made as the portable edition of WinWGet, this is a tiny download manager that acts as a GUI for WGET. It includes several advanced configuration settings dedicated to HTTP, FTP and logs, in addition to support for threaded jobs, Clipboard live monitoring, and Firefox integration.

Since there is no setup involved, you can save the program files in any location on the disk and just click the executable to launch WinWGet, provided that you have WGET on the PC. There is also the possibility to save it to a removable storage unit to directly run it on any PC with minimum effort. Unlike most installers, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings.

The interface doesn't include visually attractive elements but it has a well-structured layout. At startup you are greeted by a window that invites you to add a new downloading job to the list.

You can specify the job name and URL, load all URLs from a local file (HTML or TXT format), indicate the saving directory, log messages to file to check for any errors, treat the input file as HTML, set a waiting time before beginning downloads along with the timeout, limit the download rate, or print the server response.

WinWGet is able to retry downloads even if the connection was refused, skip the retrieval of files older than the local ones, resume tasks on partially downloaded files, skip or force directory creation, as well as enable recursive download mode.

When it comes to HTTP and FTP options, you can write the user name and password together with proxy configuration properties, use cookies and load them before the session starts, disable HTTP persistent connections, switch passive FTP transfer mode, or retrieve symbolic links.

The job list can be exported to file. You can edit or delete jobs, change their order in the list, run and stop all jobs at once, activate a Clipboard live monitoring tool, modify the default WGET path and downloading directory, select the maximum number of threads, alter the HTTP and FTP proxies, customize UI fonts, and minimize the tool to the system tray area to make it non-intrusive.

No error dialogs were shown in our tests, and the program didn't hang or crash. It carried out downloading jobs swiftly while remaining light on system resources. Although it's not much to look at, WinWGet comes packed with some advanced and powerful configuration settings for helping you download files using WGET. It's not geared toward first-time users, though.