> You've had enough of LW? Just for that?

just for that?! on a regular (not every day -- but it happens every now and then) basis all of my partially downloaded files are rendered unresumable. -- that is a perfectly good reason to have had enough of lw.


i've had another go at this, as i'm loathed to loose all that dl time, and this is the closest i've got to dl resumption:

a partially downloaded 8mb file is in my incompletes folder. it's no longer in my downloads window in lw. i search for it in lw the usual way. i find it. i double click on it to reintroduce it to the downlaods list. i check the inclompletes folder -- a second/new Øk file has not been created in there (that's a good thing). lw starts to download the reintroduced file, but according to the percentage bar, from 0%. i check back in the inclompletes folder -- the 8mb file has now's date and time, so the 8mb partial file is being written to. but, even after some time, the file size does not move on from 8mb. in lw's download list the file still says 0% although presumably would if left go to 1%.. etc.

so it appears that lw is downloading partially downloaded files from the start again, over what it's already got with the same data again.

the partially downloaded files in question, the problematic ones, are the result of, obviously downloading in lw, but also then from when lw crashes (which it does easily and often), often, but not always, initially caused by me being disconnected from the internet (which is a regular thing -- i'm on a dial up isp which terminates connection automatically after 2hours). usually on disconnection lw either doesn't crash and nothing bad happens, or crashes, but still nothing bad happens. but every now and then the downloads.dat + the downloads.bak file have been wiped (are back to 4k in size -- empty basically). at this point all my partially downloaded files have been rendered useless.

so the saving of the downloads.dat file, and also its backup mechanism in the downloads.bak file is flawed. it really should not be hard to reliably not loose the entire contents of the downloads.dat file even on a crash at any point in time (sure, maybe loose the most recent additions but not the whole thing ) -- that comes down to bad programming.

i would be quite happy if there was some way to resume those files. at the moment they amount to a *lot* of wasted downloading time, which for me is a pretty limited thing.