Get a Better Rapidshare / Megaupload Experience : 4 Step-By-Step Methods

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Both Rapidshare and Megaupload are incredibly popular sites to download content from, but they can be a bit tricky to navigate, find and download what you’re actually looking for.  Here are 4 ways that should help you move faster and get a better experience.

1. How to find files on Rapidshare / Megaupload

While the inbuilt search for these content sites (eg. Megaupload) are notoriously poor, third party search sites do the job fairly well.  FileFab, FunFail, Crawlrapidshare and Megauploadbot are three useful search engines that specialize in digging out results from these sites.

2. How to check if the Rapidshare / Megaupload links are working

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, the next thing you need to be wary about is if the link is still working.  Many of these links may be broken or have been taken down for one reason or another, but may still show up in search results.  The Cavern Links Checker is a free Greasemonkey script which works in Firefox. 

What it does is, it detects links on a webpage from content downloading sites like Megaupload & Rapidshare and color codes them green or red depending on whether they are live or not.

3. How to skip all the unnecessary pages when downloading from Rapidshare / Megaupload

Next, once you’ve determined which link you want to click-through, here’s how you save time.  Most download sites force you to click through ad-laden pages and wait for countdowns if you don’t have a premium account.  Skipscreen is a powerful Firefox extension with a strong proposition.  It allows you to skip unnecessary pages on sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, zShare, Mediafire, and more.  Watch the short video below for a cool demo.

4. How to control your download speed so you can surf while downloading from Rapidshare / Megaupload

Once you’re downloading something, there is sometimes a tendency to have that download session eat up all the bandwidth available.  This is fine if you’re not at your desk, but if you want to use the net at the same time, you may want to consider using JDownloader. 

This a free desktop tool which allows you access to all sorts of advanced functions like multiple parallel download streams, captcha recognition, and best of all, speed caps on your downloading, so you can go full speed when you’re away, and take it down a notch when you’re using the computer at the same time.

Bonus Link: How to manually preview Rapidshare files