I use Orbit myself, enough for my needs and i really like that it integrates well into all of my browsers(IE, FF and Opera). As for speed increase, i really wouldn’t know since i am on a pretty decent boradband connection and it usually goes really fast unless the download servers are really slow that is.
I have been using Star Downloader for ages and never found a need to look elsewhere. However, with FF3.0 I often just use the default download function in that.
Gigaget is good atleast it was for me and Have you tried Internet Download accelererator It is good and integrates with firfox,Opera and netscape You can try it from here www.Westbyte.com
This isn’t free but when I tried it on my computer it didn’t expire even after a month I We can continue downloading with it even if it get’s expired
I tried gigaget and whenever I download anything with gigaget from filehippo.com it abandons the connection with filehippo and downloads from other sites are the sites from which it is downloading safe