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I was on the website of NVIDIA, trying to find the up-to-date driver of High Definition Audio for my old PC running Windows XP.

Finally I found the link for the audio driver, but when I clicked the link, my browser downloaded an .exe file in around 1.2 MB file size instead.
A minute later, when I double clicked the .exe file, a pop up screen told me that the .exe file was connecting to the Internet to download the whole driver of NVIDIA High Definition Audio. I guessed its file size was more than 300 MB because it took 20 minutes to download the whole driver. After the driver was successfully downloaded, and when it tried to install the driver, I mistakenly pressed the cancel button. I tried to find the downloaded driver but of no luck.

Given that situation, I am wondering whether there is any free software that can list all the recent downloaded files in my PC for me?

Thank you and Happy New Year!

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  • There is no standard where such programs have to store the files, presumably they will be stored somewhere in temp. Procmon can tell you where a program reads and writes.
    – Marged
    Jan 1, 2016 at 9:39
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    I'd start to check the browser history. What browser are you using? For Firefox, you can even list the downloads directly by clicking the corresponding icon (a down-pointing arrow).
    – Izzy ♦
    Jan 1, 2016 at 11:31

2 Answers 2

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Technically, files downloaded from the Internet have an alternate data stream called Zone.Identifier.

You can use Windows built-in commands to locate such files. Windows will list such streams when used with dir /r. Unfortunately, dir does not take *:Zone.Identifier as an argument, so you must use findstr along with it.

To order by date, use /od. To search recursively, use /s, but it seems that breaks /od a bit in the way that it is only ordered by date per directory.

dir /r /od /s | findstr ":Zone.Identifier:$DATA"

This approach is gratis and works on Windows.

For further information, look at the question What is Zone Identifier? on Stack Overflow.

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Agent Ransack can help you, even if it does not analyze the alternate data streams that identify a file downloaded from the Internet. As you roughly know the size (between 300 MB and 400 MB) and the date (between today and yesterday), you can specify those as criteria for the file search. Just enter *.* as the file name and chose a complete drive or even multiple drives (c:\;d:\).

Agent Ransack screenshot

Agent Ransack is free but needs registration by giving away your email address. If you like it, a single user "license" is at 10$. It works on Windows.

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