When you use the command line wget for the first time on a Windows XP machine (and probably others – Vista and 7 ) you might get an error message,

Unable To Locate Component
This application has failed to start because LIBEAY32.DLL
was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

On a new Windows installation you may have installed wget but the problem is that wget32 needs other library files (libeay32.dll, libintl3.dll, libiconv2.dll and libssl32.dll) and these are not usually on a new Windows machine.

What you probably forgot to do with installing wget is install the dependencies !

Go to the GNU Wget binary download site for Windows and get the “Dependencies” ZIP file. Unpack the 4 DLLs from that /bin/ directory in the ZIP file into the same /bin/ directory where you have the wget.exe.

Wget will now work.

I use wget to download large ISO files from places that don’t have obvious bittorrent links e.g. Sourceforge. I do this because wget is more reliable than the browser in handling partial downloads i.e. where the Internet link has been closed and you have received only part of the file. Wget allows you to restart the download where it last finished.