One of the mostly overlooked changes in Windows Vista is the new Downloads folder in a users account. It's even so popular that Firefox has automatically put downloads there since the release of Vista.

While that's certainly an improvement on the old way of using a temp folder somewhere in the Windows folder (the number of times I've lost work from working on documents that were actually in a temp folder so I couldn't find them after closing the document is not a happy thought), it can present a problem of disk space. When I'm using Windows XP, my normal workflow is to download an installer file to the Desktop and then delete it after it has been used. Occasionally I might save it to a USB hard disk if I want it for other computers.

With Windows Vista, I tend to click on the open option in the Download window in Firefox, and then forget about the file. My memory was jogged yesterday when I  noticed that I was running out of space on my C drive. I went through some music that could be moved to my music server and then thought about the Downloads folder. 1Gb is quite a significant amount of space, and it was enough to take me out of the red.

Small aside: A very positive feature in Vista is the bar in the My Computer window that warns when disk space is getting low, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed this problem until later and it was causing real problems.