Can't download anything in Windos 7 RC using FF or IE

ryguy222 · 06 Jul 2009

I've had this problem before when I had build 7000 the beta, but now I have the RC. I've had 7 on my laptop for about a month now and it happend today. The laptop has been sleeping all day and I successfully downloaded a few things yesterday.

I can't download anything, If I need to download quicktime or iTunes, or zinio reader, photos, anything I can't download it. What happens is it ticks while it downloads, but when I find the program in the downloads folder its file size is zero KB. Usually the error is this is not a valid win 32 application. So I went to a vista machine, downloaded a few programs, put the setup files on my thumb drive and installed the few items. But I can't download anything on my windows 7 machine.

I had the same problem with 7 beta on my desktop, and installing opera off a thumb drive did the trick. It would let me download using opera. Well I don't really want to use opera all the time, cuz I like firefox better.

Anyway, I got fed up and re-installed beta and the problem went away.

But I don't want to re-install any OS I've done that too many times with vista, and I'm hoping there is a way around it.

Looked at my control panel, and noticed that the computer has allocated some ram somewhere else, as it says under system specs that I have 4gb of ram (3.00 useable)
MY video card is a 9800m GT and it has 512mb of ram. I don't think it would allocate that gb to video.. does that have anything to do with my issue?

Night Hawk · 06 Jul 2009

The memory allocated to your video card has nothing to with any browser. I can tell you right off that a repair install will likely correct the problems without the need for a full clean install if something went onto the drive fully. Repair Install

That will take awhile maybe a good 50min. to an hour over a full install and starting over for everything else as well. I've already done that here a few times already with the RCs. The only things that tend to get knocked out are the video card's driver's and software while the remaining programs are left intact.

For the most part it sounds mostly like IE 8 took a blow of some type where the repair install method will repair the problems since IE 8 is included in the RCs.

vasujain · 06 Jul 2009

try using a download manager ....like dap and idm..they would help u in downloading ....and clear the browser caches and temp ....before u use download managers..

Night Hawk · 06 Jul 2009

With the popup blocker on as well as the security settings up too high in IE that would be one thing to look over as well. Have any 3rd party IE protection in use?

Another thing to look at would be the types of downloads and from where. hhhmmmm... IE 8 will tend to block things if no problem with it is being seen.

ryguy222 · 06 Jul 2009

Well like I said I usually don't use Internet Explorer for anything, but tried since I've had the download problem. I don't have any security right now, I probably should, but I'm not downloading stupid stuff from un-trusted sources. Can't find a decent program that will work in windows 7 besides AVG.
Anyway.. how is a repair install done?

akramh · 06 Jul 2009

you need to put the W7 DVD, and boot up your machine, boot from DVD like you have done when installing W7, then select the repair option.

you said by using opera it let you download on w7 beta, have you tried that on the RC w7 as well? you might want to try just for troubleshooting, also now that you have gone back to beta, try and do a clean install of RC and see if the problem persists..

Night Hawk · 06 Jul 2009

When you boot from the 7 dvd the repair tools are for any startup problems or manually starting the system restore feature. To perform a repair install while still needing the disk in the drive you don't run the installer until already booted into the present installation.

Once you start the setup.exe manually with a double click when browsing the disk or simply toss the disk in when already in Windows with the auto play options set for installing programs and the installation screen appears you go on from there and select the upgrade not custom option to see the present installation overwritten without rewritting a new registry since that will be replacing the main Windows files.

The installer will first back everything up into a temp location during the upgrade process but will only copy the registry and other things that saw changes from the basic install. The main files are left out since new ones are then copied to the drive. That insures any that were missing or corrupted are replaced.

The repair install tutorial covers the steps there on how go about all of this. Once the repair is performed you should be able to download normally even with the default settings in IE 8 with the security prompts and popup blocker active however.

The main problem seems to be from incomplete installations seen with both the beta and RCs. That also means two separate blank dvds pointing more at the drive or program used for burning may be why the two installations ended up with problems.

If you had a usb hard drive attached or usb flash you could try an alternate method of repair to see if the first optical method is the source of the problems to begin with ending up with bad/incomplete installations.

ryguy222 · 06 Jul 2009

For the record when I said I re-install beta, I mean that when I was using beta on my desktop and encountered this issue, I re-installed beta (this was before RC was out) I now have RC on my desktop and have not had this issue.

I will try opera first, because I can stand using opera until october 22nd when my pre-order of windows 7 shows up! Either way I'll still have to install vista again to upgrade to windows 7 right?

akramh · 06 Jul 2009

try the repair option then for the RC install
btw, is your RC installation a clean install or upgrade? I heard it's recommended to do a clean install to avoid any issues with these builds.. since they are all test builds anyway, and the upgrade installation might leave old files or drivers unupgraded thus causing a conflict..

Night Hawk · 07 Jul 2009

When the RCs were first available I performed repair installs on both the 64bit and 32bit RCs without a hitch. That preserved everything on the RCs except the need to reinstall the ATI catalyst and drivers again for the video card.

For the 64bit host install that was simply to restore the 7 splash screen once the EasyBCD tool was used to add in the previous Vista installation leaving that seeing the Vista boot screen at the time. The 32bit ran into another problem and was quickly repaired by the same method.

Remember this was all done with the RCs already having seen clean installs. When the finished product is going on the existing installations will be wiped first to insure a nice clean install of the finished product. akramh is quite correct on planning a clean install when the time comes to insure the best results.