I've apparently been downloading something measuring 3.82gb since 1300 hrs yesterday. I say 'apparently' as I'm by no means certain. This is my first experience of a biggish download, and I don't know the claimed speed of my broadband connection via Plusnet, but twenty three hours seems a bit excessive. There is no progress bar, so the computer might be just sitting there doing nothing and laughing at me. Help.
It seems to depend on what you are downloading and from where. Although you may have 2,3,or 4 mbs download speed on your ISP the server you are downloading from may not be so generous. I recently downloaded the latest Open Office app and it seemed to take a long time, much longer than its size would have justified normally on my 4mbs connection. Twenty three hours does seem a long time, have you checked the downloads panel? On Safari this is found under the Window menu.
I gave up at forty eight hours, having decided that it was in fact doing nothing. I was trying to download the second series of Life on Mars from Pirate Bay, using BitTorrent, which does not seem to be the ideal app for my setup. My friend who uses W*****s is now doing this successfully, albeit taking an unconscionably long time to do so.
Hasn't Pirate bay been taken over by another company who is trying to make it legit? Maybe this is your problem. Have you tried iPlayer or ITV player instead?
Well, I did hear that, but I don't think that could be the problem. My chum has successfully downloaded both series of Ashes to Ashes in what seems to me next to no time i.e. a day or so. He has a chum who uses Leopard and recommends a bitTorrent app that does not work on Tiger, grrrrrrr. And I'm pretty sure that iPlayer only works on Leopard. I daresay I'll have to upgrade eventually.
I'm now using VUZE, which seems like greased lightning compared with BitTorrent. I've downloaded six or seven items, and now am 'seeding' them. This seems, however, to be what the Americans call a qualified success; inasmuch as they will not play back, apart from the soundtrack. I get the message that ' this appears to be a VLC file'. I'm pretty sure it isn't, as VLC won't play it either. I only downloaded VLC because VUZE alleged that the offending files had been downloaded from outside VUZE, which was untrue. Neither VUZE nor VLC are the latest version, because the latest ones will not run on Tiger.
Now I come to think of it the message has changed since I installed VLC; the previous message identified the file type as something else: WLT, WKT, or something like that; something which VLC falsely claimed to be able to open, anyway.
My untutored mind suggests that the problem might lie with VUZE's prefs settings; and I'm pretty sure I found something in it's Help labyrinth yesterday that told me how to correct the problem. But it must have been talking about a different version, as that item was nowhere to be found. Any suggestions will be gratefully considered.
Eric Jervis 