Picture this… You have a corrupted driver on your windows machine or your installation of that new game mod you downloaded does not work. Either which way you are missing a single file and might have to download a HUGE zip file to get it. I hate this with a passion.

Why should I have to waste bandwidth on downloading a 500mb zip or other archive file when all I need is a 1.2mb DLL file? Well up until now it was the only way to get what you needed (except from a Bit Torrent Download) now with the find of the year I can do exactly what I need to do!

We downloaded LoadScout 3.0. LoadScout will work on any Windows 9x operating system or better. That includes Windows 98, NT,2000,Me,XP and of course Vista.

Their website even boosts that you can even get any part of a video or an audio file and preview it before downloading. This is in addition to being able to browse the files within the archive as if they are a directory and download multiple file simulatenously from your download location.

This little 1mb application called LoadScout will allow me to grab a single file from an archive – either via HTTP download or via FTP download! This really got me excited, so I grabbed a few of the junior admin’s in my department and gave it a shot. Let’s check it out.

I needed to grab an older Creative Sound Driver this morning so I will use that for my example. I had the URL of the file in need. It is

http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/Archive/Microstar%20-%20MSI/driver/driver/1373_98se.zip

I opened up LoadScout and hit the OpenUrl Button and pasted my address in and it changed the default from FTP to HTTP and all of a sudden I saw the two files in the archive on the left pane. WOW!

I right-clicked on the file I needed and chose extract I got the screen below that made it simple to download and extract either a single file or multiple files.

You can also find out basic information on a archive file like what compression/program was used to create the file by choosing the Get Info button on the main toolbar. I also tried creating a zip file with MP3′s in it and another with an AVI.

I was able to extract just the track or video I wanted and download it – but I could not figure out how to preview either via LoadScout… Even with out this functionality this program is still the first on the block to break down archives at the server level. But If any of you guys get audio or video preview going let us know how you did it!

To me this is revolutionary!

This should be included in ALL FTP clients. Have you ever seen an application that had this magic ability? Do you have any other FTP tips or tricks to share with us? If you do hit us up in the comments.