My downloads keep stopping too early :-/

eskimo

I have Windows Vista Home Basic on a Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop. I used both Firefox and Internet Explorer, both are fully up-to-date versions.

No matter which browser I use, for some reason over the past few weeks, the vast majority of my downloads are claiming to be "Complete" when they clearly aren't. For example, when downloading a 350MB video file, when it reached 75MB the download window said "Download Complete" and left it at that. On trying to open the file, I get an error message saying "File Not Valid" or whatever.

This has happened with downloads of various different kinds of files, mostly with media files. It happens in both Firefox and IE.

I recently moved house and this problem has been happening in both houses with both different internet accounts/connections. The only similarity is that I'm using a Netgear Wireless Router in both cases.

I have ruled out a temporary fail in the internet connection because in one case I was downloading two files and only one of the files stopped early and claimed to be "Complete" while the other one continued to download to actual completion. If there had been a fail in internet connection, both files would have stopped early.

Can anyone help with this??

Thanks!

Signpost

there is no timeout's in firefox so it should work. is this torrent files or normal files you are downloading?

eskimo

Regular files, not torrents.

Capt'n Midnight

Sometimes this happens with proxies

try downloading with something else to see if it's the browser or something else like firewall, AV or whathaveyou

cpu-dude

When downloading these files, does it say what the total size is or just downloading size unknown?

eskimo

It says what the total size is. And then stops way before it reaches that.

FSL

Do IE and Firefox store the download in a temporary file until the download is completed? If so do you have sufficient space allocated for temporary internet files?

eskimo

Yes I always have more than enough disk space for the file(s) being downloaded.

IE/Firefox save the file onto the desktop as soon as it starts to download and then the file increases in size as it is being downloaded.

The problem is that it stops downloading ("completes") too early and I am left with an unreadable (for example) 75MB file that is supposed to be 350MB, and IE/Firefox telling me the download is "Complete."

Alun

eskimo wrote: »

The problem is that it stops downloading ("completes") too early and I am left with an unreadable (for example) 75MB file that is supposed to be 350MB, and IE/Firefox telling me the download is "Complete."

As someone else asked, are you going through a proxy of some sort? They can sometimes cause these kinds of problems. If so, try configuring your browser or Internet Options to remove the proxy reference and try again.

PogMoThoin

Run ccleaner to clear your temp folders and de-crapify

eskimo

I've been using computers for about 13 years, and the Internet for about 10 years, yet I'm not quite sure what "going through a proxy" means. Whatever it is, I don't think i'm doing it lol, BUT I could be wrong.

Re: cleaning out my Temp files and de-crapifying, I delete ALL my internet files every time I use the internet, which is almost every day, in whatever browsers I've been using, so there are no temporary internet files on my computer really.

I use TuneUp Utilities which I have running in the background constantly so that tends to take care of any other crap that might be going on.

Maybe this problem of mine isn't meant to be solved!! I really appreciate the replies so far though - thanks everyone!

Rambo

I use flashget to do all my downloads ,you can even continue a failed download

http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm

and also make sure you get the plugin for firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/220