Shortly before the efx2 community was thrust into the throes of change one member shared a You Tube file that taxed the patience of us dial-up users. Some of us were disappointed.

I've been in the habit of turning off the sound and letting the You Tube file load, always on a different page via a tab opened for that purpose. I either left the computer to find something else to do, or first opened a page that provided a lot of reading material for me to kill some time while I waited. I guess, we all have our methods.

I found something better. After download, installing and testing this gizmo, I've decided to tell all my dial-up friends, acquaintances and mysterious blog lurkers about this. Surely, some of you are familiar with this program, especially if you found the link to it in the add-ons section of the Mozilla Firefox website.

It's called the Free Download Manager. If you scroll down on the page this link takes you to then you'll find instructions on how to use this program to download flash videos from You Tube, My Space and a number of other sites. This program has a lot of cool features. However, it's limited to MS Windows users (9x/ME/2000/2003/XP/Vista *32bit versions only*).