When I try and download anything on my Dell Inspiron 1545, they always try
and save it on to my recovery disc, which says there’s no memory left and
therefore, won’t download it. I don’t know if I’ve accidentally changed a
setting for it to automatically save to that or what’s happened and was hoping
you could help me.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #62, I look at a case where the default download location has
been set incorrectly.
Download location
Well, unfortunately, you haven’t told me what browser you’re using – and
this is a very browser specific thing. But yes, somehow the setting that says,
“This is the default location to store downloads,” has been changed.
Now, in the Options for your browser (be it Internet
Explorer or Firefox or Chrome or whatever), there will absolutely be a setting.
That setting will specify a path to where you want downloads to go by default.
That obviously should not be your recovery drive.
Setting the path
My guess is your recovery drive is D: – and you don’t want it to be anything
on D:.
What you probably want is for it to be something on the C drive; your system
drive, which presumably has a lot of free space. But that is all it is.
Go spelunking in your browser options. Use your browser’s built in
Help system. This is something that is very common. It is very
commonly changed so there should be good help information in the browser itself
to guide you through this setting, so that you can reset it to something that
will actually work for you.
Next from Answercast 62 – My
machine won’t finish booting, what do I do?
Sometimes if you don’t have a default set, it will store it in the last location you stored it (that is what it does on my XP using Firefox). When you say you want to save something, you should have the option to tell it where before you actually do the [OK]. In other words, can’t you pick where you want to save the file on the fly?
Dan, In Firefox, right click on the item to download and select Save Link As. This will give you the option to choose an alternate location to save something instead of the default location.
sorry to be redundant. I used to be able to download to a specific place, but this morning, it suddenly goes to my download folder.
I can’t find the place to let me save it where I want it.
I use Firefox, Windows 11.
Thank you in advance
Each program that saves data saves it in its own default location. There is no global Windows save location. In Firefox click the 3 horiyontal line icon near the top right. Click Settings. Click Downloads, it’s Most default to saving in either Documents or Downloads, and others in their proprietary folder. Most let you change the save location in settings. If any have changed, it’s the fault of the program that saves files.
In Firefox it’s in Settings -> Downloads.