Documents on the desktop

Thanks for your reply, Roger. I understand how to change downloads locations, and how to set a default place for downloads to be saved. I don't think that's the issue.

In my email and in Firefox (not Safari), I have selected "Always ask me where to save downloads". This works, without any problem, IF I select "Save" instead of "Open" when I want to open an email attachment or I want to download a document from a website.

However, when I just want to open an attachment or open a document on a website just to read it and then close it down (i.e. without saving it anywhere), that's when it becomes a problem, because it automatically gets saved to my desktop.

I don't want a copy of every document I open saved on my desktop or anywhere else on the computer. A lot of the time, I just want to have a look at a document, scan it quickly, maybe forward the email to somebody else who might want it, and then I will probably never want to look at that document again.

So the problem is that regardless of whether I want a copy of the document saved or not, it gets saved on my desktop.

That is the thing that I would like a solution to, please, if anyone knows a way to stop this happening.

Thanks

Thanks, Mark. I use Firefox mainly, and I have set Firefox preferences to not save downloaded files to the desktop or to the downloads folder. I have also set the preferences to 'always ask me where to save files'. I have also set these preferences in email (Thunderbird).

If I select "save" instead of "open" when downloading a file, it will ask me where to save it; no problems there. But if I just ask it to open the file, it saves it to the desktop. That's the bit that is really getting silly.

With the USB stick thing; I think that might be a mistake on my part, so I will remove that one as a problem at the moment and make note of what happens next time I use a USB stick.

I will do as you suggest and run the Disc Utility and Repair Permissions and see if that helps.

Cheers

Linda

Sorry, Michael 🙂

The automatic save to the desktop is happening with PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint - everything I open from the web or email.

I ran 'verify disk' and it came up as OK. I don't have the admin permissions to run repair disk, apparently.

I'll revisit the preferences and see if there is a way to change this behaviour.

Thanks for your help

OK; thanks - I'll try that.

Cheers