Download pain from Microsoft

I have spent the past two days trying to get a copy of the DirectX SDK from Microsoft in some form.  There is nothing else to do except call it broken.

After multiple restarts, alternate mechanisms, web searches, bitching in forums and twiddling with settings, I am throwing in the fucking towel.

I firmly think this is to do with some catastrophic weirdness in the CDN network.  Becasue after testing it in various ways, there seems to be a partial cache of whatever I have downloaded somewhere in the system... as it picks up from that same point, no matter what machine I start the download on.

Honestly, its been flakey as hell.  After the initial rush, it usually settles down at about 10-20kBs per second.  Which I could deal with as thats the sort of speed I get for everything at home, however the downloads just die.  They don't say they die... but they still quit and the browser thinks its fine.  The file is incomplete so it doesnt work.  The download is finished, so it can't be re-started.  More time wasted.

Should I try a download manager with a restart capacity?  Should I just get it as a torrent somewhere?

I have used the web installer to get the Windows SDK but because it has stopped and started so many times and fails silently ( while claiming to have finished) I just do not trust what its downloaded.

Just to be bloody minded, I have re-started the SDK download.... and watched it jump past the first 100 odd meg then drop down to a seady ~29kBs.  Not shoddy but not what I expected.

I am comming to the conclusion that either Microsoft has decided to throtle the shit out of their network, or something flakey is happening in their caching system.

If you look over the MS forums, there are repeated incidents of this kind of problem being reported with little seeming response.


Sep 2011
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/msdnfeedback/thread/5ddfd202-1057-43f1-aef6-3e44243d7c1d


http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/msdnfeedback/thread/dacd34dd-bd5f-47c7-bd6c-352f61520f25


All the addresses I trace resolve back to Akamai servers in Sydney with virtually a hard link to aarnet which should give me a multi-megabit link straight through.  But I am still seeing a few kilobits per second.

Damit... just had another attempt drop out in Firefox.  Now there is only one DL manager session running.  All my hopes are pinned on it.