BITS on Anything About IT

ToolTip: Bits Monitor

Sat, 14 May 2011 09:40:48 +0000

Bits Monitor is a small FREE utility that displays BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) activity.

Bits Monitor can be downloaded from here

BITSAdmin is deprecated in Windows 7 and 2008 R2

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:38:07 +0000

Just recently when I created a script using BITSAdmin, I noticed the following text when running the BITSAdmin executable: BITSADMIN is deprecated and is not guaranteed to be available in future versions of Windows. Administrative tools for the BITS service are now provided by BITS PowerShell cmdlets.

So BITS with PowerShell landed on my to-look-at list, but just today I came across Ashley McGlone’s Blog – Big Downloads With Powershell which contains a sample script for BITS downloads using PowerShell. With all respect to PowerShell, I do hope Microsoft is not considering replacing all the handy command line tools with PowerShell cmdlets :-)

ToolTip: Bits GUI Admin

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:23:13 +0000

In an earlier post [Using BITS for file downloads](Using BITS for file downloads) I wrote about how to use BITS for file transfers. Today I had a BITS related topic at work, so needed a brief refresher and found some additional interesting things.

First I came across a TechNet Utility Spotlight article Scripting Trouble-Free downloads with BITS. If you are interested in creating your own BITS based download scripts, read this article and download the provided bitsjob.vbs and bitsjob.cmd files. Note that the article is dated back from 2006, so no mention about Windows 7 here, but no worries bitsadmin.exe is included in Vista and Windows 7 already.

Using BITS for file downloads

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:12:01 +0000

Today I have come across the topic BITS which stands for Binary Intelligent Transfer Service which is a file transfer technology that is included in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.

What is nice about BITS is that it provides Checkpoint recovery and network throttling. This means that when a download is being interrupted because the remote site became temporarily unavailable or you had shut down your client, BITS will automatically resume the download when the remote source becomes available again or when the machine has been powered up again.