My downloads keep completing too early. Anyone seen this?

Factual Questions
1

Well, I have a kind of weird problem with my computer

When I download files, it often has been stopping the download early and saying that it has completed the download. The file is incomplete. Anyone know why it does this?

I have a PC with Windows 98.

How can I fix this?

2

Ah. Premature encapsulation.

Try making your computer think about baseball.

3

Er, yes. Does anyone have a real answer?:confused:

4

If you are downloading in a browser, I would suggest updating it. For IE, update to 5.5 sp2. Netscape… eh, whatever you want.

You can also check out the Microsoft Knowledge base and see if they have an answer to your problem.

If you’re using a file sharing or download manager program, try updating the software.

Helpful?

5

Try useing a download manager such as Gozilla. Or updateing your browzer:cool:

6
      • I don’t know what causes it, but I have had it happen to me to. It was one file, and the error would occur in both IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.7, so I tend to think it’s something wrong on the other end rather than mine. I was trying to download a soundfont and this happened repeatedly at home, but not at the college I go to (whose gots their own servers). After the “file” downloaded, it left an icon with a listed size of 3 megs or so, but downloaded (over a 56K line) in about twenty seconds. The file crashed most programs I tried to open it with, but it apparantly didn’t really contain anything. The same webpage had lots of others that downloaded correctly.
(this is where they starts to squirm--)
 - What/where are the files you were trying to download? - DougC
7

I’ve had this happen with me too several times. Usually I just keep trying until the file doesn’t cancel. Maybe it has something to do with the other end cancelling the connection? I don’t know, but, usually, repeated tries will (eventually) work. I know it can suck with some larger files and slow servers. There are some file managers out there I think that will let you resume the files, but I think the other end has to support resuming downloads; never tried it myself, though.

8

How much free space do you have on the drive to which windows has been installed?

If windows is installed on c:\ and that has 300MB free and you have 10GB free on d:\ if you download a 301MB file, even if you tell it to save on d:\ you won’t be able to download the whole file sucessfully. I don’t know why windows does this.

9

I saw the O.P.'s problem very often when I was using Netscape (the version I use is 4.76 because 6 is just too bloated), but the problem disappeared when I switched to (shudder!) Internet Exploder 5.5

Youse pays yer money…

10

Premature encapsulation? A friend of mine had this problem (it wasn’t me) it happened for a couple of reasons in my… er… his case:

One time, it was an attempted FTP download through a LAN proxy server that didn’t fully support FTP transfers; the file that downloaded was always 38 bytes long, on examination, it proved to contain only the text “Proxy server ready for FTP transfer” (it wasn’t from outside at all.

Another time, a download was interrupted by a dropped line, and subsequent attempts to download the same file appeared to happen at phenomenal speed, but still broke off at exactly the same point; this was because the file was cached locally and IE was simply downloading the incomplete cached file again. deleting the contents of the local cache fixed the problem.