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MSDN is slooooooooooow

Since I never got a "welcome e-mail" from MSDN, I began relentlessly pinging the form for a subscriber number lookup on Sunday. Finally, this morning, it worked and I got my number. I started downloading Visual Studio. Twelve hours ago. Still only two-thirds the way there. Getting 35k/second.

That's pathetic. How does a company the size of Microsoft offer a very high-end and premium download service and not have the bandwidth to support it. I keep seeing people in various forums and blogs post excuses, but there is no excuse. People are paying big money for this stuff.

What a disappointment.
Posted: Nov 08 2005, 08:59 PM by Jeff | with 12 comment(s)
Filed under: ,

Comments

Don Demsak said:

I've been downloading at around 900k/sec today, with no problems. It might be your connection, not MSDN.
# November 8, 2005 9:24 PM

Jeff said:

I doubt that very much, since I can hit 300k+ on my own server, as well as another 300k in Torrent downloads at the same time. (And no, I'm not doing both simultaneously.)
# November 8, 2005 9:27 PM

John Walker said:

Jeff,

I gotta say, mine came down extremely fast. Took about a little over an hour for the VS 2005 Pro image.
# November 8, 2005 9:42 PM

M. Keith Warren said:

I tend to get 100k
# November 8, 2005 10:22 PM

Blair said:

Try stopping the download and restart.
Don't ask me why but that fixed it for me.

Reminds me of the old days getting a slow modem when dialing to an ISP :)
# November 8, 2005 11:03 PM

Jay Welshofer said:

I regularly pull 350K from MSDN.
# November 9, 2005 12:09 AM

Roy J. Salisbury said:

My guess.. your connection is routed through one of the european or asian servers (because of your ISP's route). I used to have the same problem, but "hacked" my hosts file to point directly at the distribution server and now I get super fast downloads. Google it a bit.. the instructions are out there...

And just so you know it can be VERY FAST, I downloaded both the DVD image of Pro and the updated MSDN library in about 3 hours.
# November 9, 2005 1:56 AM

Frans Bouma said:

This time around I didn't have a problem, 300KB/sec on average. In the previous years it was slow at times. What helped was stopping and resuming hte download, making the downloadtool to switch servers, which can help.
# November 9, 2005 4:16 AM

Wallym said:

I also think the problem is your connection. My downloads are in the 200-300 KB/sec range over my cable modem.

BTW, I get frustrated to, so I know how you feel. I would check some of the other suggestions on this. :-)

Wally
# November 9, 2005 7:30 AM

Jeff said:

Thanks Roy...

http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss/archive/2005/06/07/410690.aspx
# November 9, 2005 9:53 AM

Tyler said:

First day I tried downloading and got great speeds 700KB/sec +  Now everything seems to be throttled.  Starts fast and then slows to 10 or 20 KB/sec.  Starting and stopping helps but takes many start/stops to complete a 1.5GB download.  Very annoying.    This is not my connection as I sit on a DS3.    Tried adding the server to my host file with no results.   Really seams like a throttle if pausing and resuming bursts my speed.

# May 19, 2008 12:00 PM

fastMSDN said:

I am getting 1034Kn downloads right now. I had the same problem until I changed my DNS...

TRY THIS:

www.mydigitallife.info/.../speed-up-and-download-faster-from-microsoft-msdn-downloads

# November 2, 2009 9:54 AM
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