It's a paradoxical sign of the times that Internet download acceleration tools first appeared in the dial-up days, back when broadband speeds were some way off for the average home user. How strange that now we do have high-speed Internet access as a commonplace norm, the need for a download acceleration utility hasn't gone away at all.

But then, of course, as speeds have increased, so has the range of things we're downloading, and their associated size. Internet Download Accelerator 5 is one of the many tools out there that promises to bring download times down.

It does this in an interesting and logical way. Once it has found the file you're looking to download, it chops it into many different parts that it then sets about bringing down concurrently. That approach makes sense: few of us have ever seen anything close to the numbers that our ISP of choice offered us in their advertising, and part of the reason is that downloading a single file in one chunk isn't the most efficient way to crack that particular nut. Internet Download Accelerator works easily enough with both FTP and HTTP servers, too.

The program is a small affair, just a few megabytes worth of download. And it's efficient in its presentation, with little sign of frills. The installation can get a bit fiddly if you have an efficiently firewalled machine, as the program gives you the option of installing a direct Internet Explorer plug-in (although there's no such Opera or Firefox equivalent) that set our security software alerts off on both the test systems we tried. But after this small hurdle, it's still straightforward and quick to get going with.

The program then presents you with a plain working screen, where you add a download by inputting its URL, and the category into which you want the file in question to be saved. Then Internet Download Accelerator sets off to work, and proves to be worthy of some its claims.

A test 7MB download took some time to initiate, but once the download itself had started, it took around half the time and managed twice the speed as going through our browser. We decided to keep its monitoring graph live on the bottom right of the screen, and this efficiently informed us of the program's progress in getting our file. When we subsequently threw larger test files at the program, and played about with the scheduling functionality, we were also impressed with the increased speed of our downloads (a 400Kbps jump to 1Mbps).

Whether this, however, is the kind of program you'll want to pay $25 for, particularly in the competitive marketspace in which it sits, is open to debate. But at the very least it's worth giving the free trial a spin, especially if you're constantly battling the slow speed of large downloads.

A useful application that implements its working practice effectively, and with good results. It's not the only one in its field, however.