I see a lot of posts asking this question about why LW restarts partially completed downloads at 0% instead of where it left off. I have searched the forum but haven't seen any complete answer to this yet. Sorry if I've missed it. I'm getting this problem too which I never had with Kazaa. This problem really sucks. Can anyone help?

I've got my "days to keep incomplete downloads" set to 200 and have many partially completed downloads in the Incomplete folder. Most of them play ok up to the limit of the download.

Why can't I get LW to reconnect to the partially complete DLs and start where it left off? I've got LW pointing the Incomplete folder ok.

Also, I notice that if I monitor a new DL with Explorer I can see the file size increasing as the DL progresses but then after a while, it shows the complete file size as reported by LW even though the DL is incomplete?

Weird!

Scrottocks

As you know from reading all those other posts, incompletes depend on the source(s) having an exact match. Kazaa used to use a "close enough" match, but that matching system was exploited.

--since LW uses a keyword search to find files, there are many files which "look" to be the same, but aren't. So, those files will start downloading from zero. Old incompletes won't resume unless the source has the exact match.

--the code has changed re incompletes, so maybe some of those old incompletes cannot be resumed, especially if they are quite old. They may be polluting your incompletes. If so, biting the bullet and trashing all those hard-earned incompletes may be the best bet, sadly.

--if the last chunk of a file arrives before all the intermediate pieces are in, the file will look to Explorer as a full file. I think downloads from many sources try to get the early pieces in the right order to help previews, but sources don't always send at the same speed. There is also the need to get the rarer pieces early to help share the load. So Explorer may think the file is the right lenght, but LW knows some of the middle pieces are still coming in.


btw: the chances of completeing an incomplete file from a host that offered a file 190 days ago are lousy if that host was unique --they go offline or change the files they are sharing. The 200 day setting is handy to prevent automatic clean up of incompletes, but then you'll need to manually clean up the incomplete folder.

Many thanks for that explanation. That tells me a lot