Speed up MSDN Subscriber Downloads

I found this post a while ago, but finally put it into use tonight. As I was downloading the SQL Server 2005 DVD image (~2.5GB), I noticed that I was only getting 25 KB/sec speeds. Sucks to your assmar!

After adding a USA mirror IP to my hosts file, and then trusting microsoft.com in both my Internet Explorer Trusted Sites and Privacy Sites, I saw the download speed jump to 300-400 KB/sec (it varies, but right at this moment, it's down to 115 KB/sec). The time remaining went from 25 hours to 2 hours.

Oh, yeah, and at first, the speed up didn't work. I had to flush my DNS cache so that it would pick up the new IP address from the hosts file (start|run: ipconfig /flushdns)