Direct2Drive You Crazy

Hearing all the buzz about Bioshock, I decided to skip the demo and buy the full game. As a gamer in the early 21st century, I have the option to purchase games in two ways. I can buy a hard copy disk or I can purchase a download and get a licensed copy that way. I chose to do the green thing and buy a digital copy.

I did a quick search and found Direct2Drive. I logged in and quickly found myself fifty dollars poorer and ready to download. Click... Up pops a box that says I need to use IE or I can just click a link to download my file in zip format directly. I click the link and I immediately get hit with the craptacular speed of 784Kbps down. My Cable modem from Adelphia and now Time Warner, can easily grab 8Mbps down. I was getting about 10% of this and Firefox's nifty download manger was reporting that this download will take about 17 hours to download. So I chose to open up the link in Internet Explorer and see if my speed would increase. I allow the Active-X control to run their Download Manager. I got the same pathetic speed from their download manager and here's where it really gets ridiculous.

To find out why my speeds were so slow I visit the support page of Diret2Drive. The FAQ for download trouble is pretty straight forward. The first two suggestions tell us to disable any popup blockers, firewalls, ya ya, I get it. Here is the FAQ beginning at step three emphasis mine, spelling mistakes theirs.

3. Multitasking. Don't think because you have a phat pipe you can surf, play a game then chat all over AIM. Leave your computer alone.

**And tell everyone in your house to turn off their computer, don't share your connection.


Tips:

Reboot before you download. Including your modem. Turn it off for min. of 3 minutes. Then start your comp and turn off everything you don't need to run the comp.

What kind of advice is this? Whose nephew wrote this? This download took me over 16hrs to complete. Are they seriously suggesting that I shut down my home network, do not use my PC, and watch this slow agonizing drip of data? Sorry D2D but it was slow and not because of my machine or my network.

I let the Bioshock game complete downloading rather than try to get a refund. Suffice to say I'll not be using Direct2Drive ever again. I hope the game turns out to be worth the pain in the butt it was to get.