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All of my downloads over ~200MB either fail or end up corrupt

  • 7 replies
  • 13 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Whenever I try to download something that's sized ~200 Megabytes or higher, it will take multiple (5-10+) tries to download it with success. The download will either fail somewhere in the middle of the process, or it will "finish" faster than it should, and when I try to open it, it ends up corrupt. I've tried restarting/resetting firefox in the past, but the larger downloads still will almost always fail in some way.

One other issue that is somewhat related to this, is that my internet speed always seems to fall. It's supposedly 6 Mbps, but once it reaches ~500KBps, it slowly drops until it is around 156-180KBps. Sometimes, it will return to the higher speed, but only momentarily. I've had this downloading issue with things other than firefox, such as Steam. I power cycle my router on a regular basis, since the speeds often will reach a ludicrous level, so restarting it hasn't really solved this issue.

P.S. I know the difference between a Megabit (Mb) and a Megabyte (MB) and so forth, so I'm not making any typing errors in the speeds, just in case anyone is wondering.

Whenever I try to download something that's sized ~200 Megabytes or higher, it will take multiple (5-10+) tries to download it with success. The download will either fail somewhere in the middle of the process, or it will "finish" faster than it should, and when I try to open it, it ends up corrupt. I've tried restarting/resetting firefox in the past, but the larger downloads still will almost always fail in some way. One other issue that is somewhat related to this, is that my internet speed always seems to fall. It's supposedly 6 Mbps, but once it reaches ~500KBps, it slowly drops until it is around 156-180KBps. Sometimes, it will return to the higher speed, but only momentarily. I've had this downloading issue with things other than firefox, such as Steam. I power cycle my router on a regular basis, since the speeds often will reach a ludicrous level, so restarting it hasn't really solved this issue. P.S. I know the difference between a Megabit (Mb) and a Megabyte (MB) and so forth, so I'm not making any typing errors in the speeds, just in case anyone is wondering.

Chosen solution

Try cleaning your cache, try freeing up space, try firefox in safe mode

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All Replies (7)

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Did you recently update your firefox? What version are you using?

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Chosen Solution

Try cleaning your cache, try freeing up space, try firefox in safe mode

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I don't think a recent update would've caused this download problem, as it's gone on for longer than a month, but I am using version 37.0. I have plenty of hard drive space (1.3 TB), and I'm about to try safe mode.

Modified by dwarvenname

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Modified by shadyz

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I cleared my cache and ran it in safe mode, and it worked very well for a while, but my computer crashed in the middle of the download (not related to firefox in any way), so I couldn't download the large file, but atleast I know what was causing the problem.

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Have your ISP test your service.

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It is possible that anti-virus software is corrupting downloaded files or is interfering otherwise.

Try to disable the real-time (live) scanning of files in your anti-virus software temporarily to see if that makes downloading work.

See:


Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.