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I can't find any help forum anywhere online about this exact issue,so I thought it might be worth asking here.

In Windows 7, Explorer used to display in the Downloads folder in real time what the status of a download was...in other words,how many kb/mb's/whatever had actually been finished at that time.

In Windows 10 on both my machines it just says 0 kb's until the download is finished,then it updates to whatever the full size is. Before it finishes even if I click the Refresh button nothing happens at all...whereas in Win 7 that would immediately refresh the contents of the downloads folder.

Does anyone have any idea if this can be fixed, so that it works like it used to in Win 7?

I've already tried tons of things suggested in other forums about Explorer 'auto refresh' etc (which is sort of a different issue really I think)... none of those solutions has any effect at all on this issue. Also tried about 5 or 6 free Explorer alternative programs, but it's exactly the same in all of them.

It must be a Windows 10 thing I suppose.

At the time of this screenshot, that download was about 50% complete (as seen in FF Library window):

enter image description here

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  • I have the same problem. If I click the "refresh" button or press F5, the .part file size does not change. But there's a workaround-- if I open a new explorer window, it shows the new .part file size as of the time I open the new window. This workaround seems to show that this problem is a malfunction of the "refresh" or F5 button.
    – krubo
    Commented Jan 12, 2021 at 11:46

1 Answer 1

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The fact that the file is displayed in Explorer as 0Kb is normal. What I find astounding is that the size was continuously updated in Windows 7.

To explain:

While the file is being written, its meta-data, which is what Explorer is displaying, is not updated. This meta-data is stored in the entry in the meta-data of the disk folder containing the file. While the file is being written, the meta-data is not updated.

For the meta-data to be updated, the file must be closed or flushed, for the display of this meta-data to be correct.

Usually when downloading, you would see your file as 0KB. This would be updated only when the download is finished. For other software, you would see for file XYZ also another file named XYZ.part which will increase in size periodically. When the download is finished, the XYZ.part file will be renamed as XYZ. The periodic increase in size is due for the meta-data being periodically flushed, so that in case of a crash the download can continue from after the last flush. The .part file is sometimes marked as hidden, so you need to allow viewing hidden files to see it.

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  • Thanks for the reply and explanation. I should have made it clear that it was the '.part' bit that was being updated in Windows 7. It's hard to explain why I even care about this,it's certainly not a huge problem! In fact just now I re-checked this on my laptop and sure enough the manual refresh function is now working for updating download .part files pretty much as it used to on Win 7 on that machine...still not working on the pc though...so who knows,there must be some sort of difference in the way Win 10 is installed on the two machines I suppose...or something :)
    – Haruna
    Commented Nov 17, 2019 at 0:09

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