firewalled?

September 24, 2006 12:51 PM

What might be blocking downloads on my friend's Macbook?

My friend's Macbook Pro gets internet over our home wifi net (after tedious tweaking, but I don't think I damaged anything). She can get surf the web, but downloads seem blocked. Eg trying to get VLC, we go to the VideoLan page and click through to the download link for OSX from the Optralan mirror. This opens the page saying "Click here if your download does not start" but gets no further --no download happens at all, though it gets no error message in Safari or Firefox. (FF's download manager doesn't open either.)

My Powerbook works fine here, so I'm guessing it must be a setting on her machine, but I don't know where to look for what. Her machine is a few months old and has been fiddled with by people who know even less than I do.

I haven't been able to find out if downloads work when she's at other places -- she doesn't know.

Fwiw our wifi router is a DLink DI-614 and NAT is on an XP box (which talks IP to a satellite). My PB runs 10.3, her MP is 10.4 of course.

(And how do I stop her machine assuming that having the mouse pointer hover over a button means I want the machine to press the button for me -- this is so incredibly annoying!)

posted by anadem to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Turn off trackpad clicking in system preferences is the easy answer. I can't think of what would stop only downloads.
posted by bonaldi at 12:53 PM on September 24, 2006

the VLC mirrors offer downloads in both HTTP and FTP (it says so in the mirror info) Do both not work?
posted by vacapinta at 12:59 PM on September 24, 2006

When you click the download link, is the "downloads" window available when you check the Window menu in Safari? I'm wondering if her preferences are set to download to an obscure folder that you might not think to check in; if so you can find it from the downloads window.
posted by lalex at 1:14 PM on September 24, 2006