Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files

ta bu shi da yu writes "It appears that, incredibly, Vista can run out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but that 'often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly.' Apparently a fix was scheduled for SP1 but didn't make it; there is a hotfix that you must request."

Comments

That's OK then

[Sub Zero 992]

the box I "make use of" has just 15,000 mp3s...

Re:That's OK then

[poetmatt]

But what about the 1,401 album images?

Re:That's OK then

[Night Goat]

Well played. A little reversal move, judo-style.

Re:That's OK then

[Tomasz Guzik]

At the moment I'm using an old laptop for my workstation, so I have a little question: were you using ALSA or OSS back then?

Yes, I know, dumb question, but I've never had any real problem with sound.

Re:That's OK then

[ultranova]

Run a sound daemon to queue it in software like windows does internally?

Mixing. Queuing would be the behavior your described.

In any case, this issue is solved: ALSA, the default sound system in 2.6 kernels, has an internal mixer, which the older OSS lacked. I don't know what will happen if two programs try to use the OSS emulation layer at the same time, thought.

Re:That's OK then

[TheCoelacanth]

Your ubuntu linux box is probably just rearranging inodes, while the windows box (vista I presume) is likely creating shadow copies so that you can arbitrarily roll back your filesystem after you do something stupid. You're comparing apples to..candied apples. Yeah, they're both the same thing kinda, but one does other stuff too and you shouldn't blame the candied apple for being worse for your weight.

It still shouldn't take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file. I use a linux system thats spread across 6 partitions so I have to copy files all the time. It only takes a few seconds to copy a 17MB file between two separate partions so even if Vista is making a copy it shouldn't take that long.

Re:That's OK then

[BrokenHalo]

I'm sure linux has probably gotten a little better on some of those fronts, but even if so its still just playing catchup and not providing a reason to switch, and I know its not catching up on software.

*yawn*, another troll...

Instead of just guessing, how about you try it for a while and see just how far along Linux for the Desktop has come. You might be surprised.

Getting multiple graphics cards working is a piece of piss (I've been doing it for years). If you know enough to want/need 2 screens, you know enough to make a few simple entries in a config file. Getting sound working hasn't been a problem for at least 7 years. There's plenty of software available of equal or better quality than current offerings for Windows.

Re:That's OK then

[lpevey]

I know that you're just sharing your opinion, so I won't argue with your main point (that you think Windows is superior for desktop). But just in case someone reading this might pick up some bad information, I do want to correct you on one point. I run more than one monitor in Linux, and it's really no big deal. I've been doing it for years, as far back as Redhat 6 I think. (It was probably supported before then, I just didn't use it.) I use Ubuntu now.

As of this moment, believe it or not, Linux has better support for multiple monitors than Windows does. Vista requires the monitors to be connected to either the same video card or to video cards of the same type. In other words, in Vista, I couldn't both my evga nvidia and ati radeon (pci) together. In Ubuntu, it's no problem to set this up if you know what you're doing.

Re:That's OK then

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

OSS at the time, as ALSA didn't support my soundcard. Of course now I have a different card and I'd hope the support is overall better.

Re:That's OK then

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If you know enough to want/need 2 screens, you know enough to make a few simple entries in a config file.

Which I have no problem with, except that X11's driver model made it impossible to have both an nvidia and an ati driver'd card running at the same time, so no amount of config editting would fix it.
I also question if all the people who plug a monitor into their macbook pro and get dual monitors are also the type who would be fine with editing a config every time they wanted to do so. My guess is no.

Getting sound working hasn't been a problem for at least 7 years.

Again, if you want stereo audio with one source, it's been fine for 7 years. Internal mixing has been an issue up until the forced ALSA switch (which then limitted you to smaller hardware choices.), and I stil haven't seen 6channel audio done in linux though I'm sure it's possible, the support for the hardware is definitely lagging behind.

There's plenty of software available of equal or better quality than current offerings for Windows.

Name one that isn't also available for windows, which is my point. All the big names in linux software have windows ports, yet linux doesn't have ports of the big names in PC software.

Billy G says

[Anonymous Coward]

16k files should be enough for everybody.

Re:Billy G says

[Seismologist]

Found the quote on wikiquote:

I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within--oh five or six years people were complaining.

Re:Billy G says

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Funny, I thought he just bought the OS from someone else - didn't lay it out at all.

Re:Billy G says

[Detritus]

The operating system that he bought was a clone of CP/M. This meant that the BIOS was responsible for handling console I/O. It didn't assume the presence of memory-mapped video or I/O. You could run it on a system with serial ports and a video terminal for a console, leaving 1 MiB of address space for the operating system and user applications. It was the design of the IBM PC that reserved a big chunk of address space for memory-mapped I/O and various ROMs.

Re:Billy G says

[LSD-OBS]

Yeah, but William Henry was somehow involved with some of the design decisions of the 8088. It's a hardware limitation - nothing to do with the OS.

Re:Billy G says

[johnw]

It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form I don't know who is reponsible for the quote, but this chunk is pure drivel.

It is true to say that the *value* of the limit was dictated by the hardware, but the fact that it was a hard limit was purely the fault of the software. The problem was that the operating system's facilities for addressing the hardware - in particular the screen - were so piss-poor that programmer's had to address the hardware directly in order to achieve reasonable results. There weren't even system calls to allow the software to discover dynamically where the hardware was - the locations had to be hard coded. As a result it then became impossible to move on to a new generation of hardware (with a different limit) because the old software then wouldn't run any more.

A well written operating system would have provided:

1) Methods to drive the screen purely by system calls, without having to be aware of the hardware at all.
2) Hooks to extend the facilities for screen referencing.
3) System calls to discover the location of the hardware if it was necessary to completely circumvent the OS.

It's not as if all this wasn't known at the time. Other earlier offerings provided all this and more, but MS-DOS really didn't deserve the title of "Operating System" at all. It was a filing system and process loader with a few extra bits cobbled onto it to avoid being prosecuted under trades description laws.

In summary - the *value* of the 640K limit was dictated by hardware, the fact that it was a limit at all was purely down to the crappy software.

Re:Billy G says

[Have Brain Will Rent]

From one of the guys at Seattle Computer Products, across the street from Microsoft, in Bellevue. It started as a CPM clone.

Re:Billy G says

[Seismologist]

I hate to reply to my original posting, but I overlooked another quote on the same wikiquote page above:

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

- Bill Gates At the launch of MSX in 1983

Re:Billy G says

[ultranova]

The problem was that the operating system's facilities for addressing the hardware - in particular the screen - were so piss-poor that programmer's had to address the hardware directly in order to achieve reasonable results. There weren't even system calls to allow the software to discover dynamically where the hardware was - the locations had to be hard coded. As a result it then became impossible to move on to a new generation of hardware (with a different limit) because the old software then wouldn't run any more.

No. That was not the problem. The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.

In any case, as time went on, most DOS programs did move to next-gen hardware, first by using EMS and XMS memory, and later by using DOS extenders to run in 32-bit protected mode. Having fixed screen memory location was never the problem, quite on contrary: it made it possible to access the video card memory directly from protected mode without having to convert a 16-bit pointer from DOS into 32-bit one.

1) Methods to drive the screen purely by system calls, without having to be aware of the hardware at all.

We are talking about unaccelerated graphics card here. The fastest way to use them was to write directly to memory. Going through a system call would not only have been slower, meaning no one would had used it, but required said operating system to contain some kind of graphics driver, which would had taken up precious memory space and therefore hindered every program.

It's not as if all this wasn't known at the time. Other earlier offerings provided all this and more, but MS-DOS really didn't deserve the title of "Operating System" at all. It was a filing system and process loader with a few extra bits cobbled onto it to avoid being prosecuted under trades description laws.

DOS is perfect for what it's designed for - a filing system for two 360 kB diskettes that takes up little memory and doesn't get in your way, and lets you get your program into the memory. Of course a system resulting from these design parameters doesn't work too well in a modern machine with 500 GB hard disk, gigabytes of memory and a dazzling array of extension cards.

And, frankly, I doubt anyone at either IBM nor Microsoft realized that the IBM PC would still be in use, extended beyond nearly all recognition, 26 years later.

Re:Billy G says

[rspress]

If memory serves and mine might be as faulty as Microsofts, the bought a program that was indeed based on CP/M called QDOS. Microsoft was in no way interested in selling an OS, all they wanted was to sell Microsoft Basic, their main reason for being at the time. IBM wanted a DOS so to please IBM Microsoft, Bill, sold them the DOS before he had bought it.

Re:Billy G says

[Firehed]

I'll bet it is. That's close enough to a power-of-two (16,384, as if you didn't already know) that it's probably just some idiotic coding error that slipped by.

Re:Billy G says

[Pedersen]

The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.

Wow, and here I thought that using nothing but 16 bit pointers would limit you to 64K of RAM, as 16 bit pointers would allow direct access to 65536 bytes of RAM (2^16=65536). Thanks for clearing that up. I'll go back and fix up some of my code now, so that I can reference that extra 384K that I didn't know was accessible.

Or would it be safer to say that 20 bit pointers and memory banking is what got you capable of using a full meg of memory?

Re:Billy G says

[SEE]

The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.

Not quite. The 16 bits is what limited the segments to 64 kilobyte chunks -- 2^16 = 65,536. The megabyte limit was the result of the twenty-bit segmented memory addressing in the 8088 -- 2^20 = 1,048,576. (The 640K limit was then the result of the upper 384K -- originally 512K -- being reserved by the IBM PC for ROM and memory-mapped hardware.)

Re:Billy G says

[StikyPad]

And arguably, they never have.

Zing!

Re:Billy G says

[jhesse]

No, because there was no such thing as a 20 bit pointer. You had two 16 bit pointers, a segment and an offset that were added together (with the segment shifted by 4 bits) to generate a 20 bit memory address.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-bit_x86_assembly_programming#The_segmented_addressing_model

Re:Billy G says

[petermgreen]

Or would it be safer to say that 20 bit pointers and memory banking is what got you capable of using a full meg of memory?
Actually that wouldn't be entirely correct either

Real mode on the 8086 and derivitives is a bit weired in this regard.

Memory is divided into segments, each segment is 64K but the segments overlap such that there were 64K segments. This meant that the system could allocate blocks of memory starting at the start of a segment with 16 byte granularity.

pointers come in two types, near pointers and far pointers, near pointers are 16 bit and can only point to stuff in the current segment (note: there are seperate current segments for code and data), far pointers have seperate 16 bit fields for segment and offset (giving a total pointer size of 32 bit) and can point to any location in any segment.

Re:Billy G says

[petermgreen]

what do you call windows NT then?

Re:Billy G says

[Mattsson]

And managed to land a contract where IBM payed MS per sold machine regardless if MSDOS/QDOS where shipped with it or not, making it more or less impossible for IBM to ship their machines with anything else, thus leading to the MS of today.

Re:Billy G says

[Nazlfrag]

32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition perhaps?

Re:Billy G says

[rspress]

What a deal they made! You have to wonder what would happen if MS had to play like any other software company had to and not have a tie in to the per machine cost. When the better DRDOS came out and was really eating into Microsofts DOS sales MS dropped a windows beta on the world that when run and found you were running DRDOS told you future windows versions will not work with it, has to be the one of the greatest dirty tricks of all time.

It was also pretty hard to believe MS when they stated that the Mac OS had little to do with the development of Windows when they hired UI Design artists like Susan Kare who worked on the Mac UI. Check out this site: http://www.kare.com/portfolio.html

Strangely I see a lot of parallels between Apple and Microsoft during the Vista development. When Apple was developing Copeland, the next generation Mac OS, release dates kept slipping and grand features would pop up and disappear just as quickly. Apple had lost its way, which was great because Jobs came back and Copeland was dumped and NextOS was made into OS X. Which gives me the power of Mac OS and Unix as well.

I really think Microsoft should have dumped vista and started from scratch on a new Windows OS. I think Longhorn was Microsofts Copeland and they made the wrong decision. I have two XP boxes running XP SP2 and I won't be upgrading those to Vista anytime soon. I am even running XP on my mac laptop with parallels desktop. Time will tell if they can make Vista into something better but every PC I have been around lately is still running XP.

Re:Billy G says

[johnw]

No. That was not the problem. Yes, it was the problem.

The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). You have clearly failed to understand what the problem is. It's *not* that programs running on an 8086 can't access more than 1M of RAM, which is what you're talking about above.

The problem is that even when the hardware limitations were removed in later revisions, the deficiencies of the operating system meant that existing programs couldn't make use of the new facilities.

1) Methods to drive the screen purely by system calls, without having to be aware of the hardware at all. We are talking about unaccelerated graphics card here. The fastest way to use them was to write directly to memory. Going through a system call would not only have been slower, meaning no one would had used it, Bollocks. Any program worth considering implemented its screen access routines as a library, and it was perfectly possible to produce library code which would access the screen 20 to 50 times faster than the pitiful facilities provided by the OS. The point is this library code should have been in the OS - it would have been just as fast and the 640K limit (*not* as you suggest in your attempt to obfuscate, a 1M limit) would have been avoided.

And, frankly, I doubt anyone at either IBM nor Microsoft realized that the IBM PC would still be in use, extended beyond nearly all recognition, 26 years later. Ah yes - another obfuscation technique - "It's perfectly all right for me to push out crap code because I don't think it will be in use for very long."

I get really, really tired of people trying to make excuses for what was simple plain incompetence on the part of the original programmers. They weren't trying to do anything new and they just couldn't be bothered to study any contemporary solutions to discover how to do the job properly. The amount of time which has been wasted because of their incompetence boggles the mind.

Re:Billy G says

[petermgreen]

while that phrase is somewhat funny there isn't any truth in it.

Re:Billy G says

[StikyPad]

The argument there would not be that it isn't 32-bit, but whether or not it qualifies as an operating system. A turd by any other name...

Anyway, it was just a joke. I consider XP to be a fairly good OS.

Re:Billy G says

[sehrgut]

*snerk* Yep, Leopard pretty much kills Vista! http://digg.com/apple/Leopard_Kills_Vista

Welcome to Windows Vista

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

At the end, there will be free therapy. And Cake!

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[TellarHK]

... and grief counseling.

Cake, and grief counseling. Far more appropriate. I just switched my primary desktop to Vista this past weekend (More a "Why the hell not, gotta learn it to support it -someday-) resignation, and have seen that after it's patched... Vista's still a buggy bastard. I haven't seen Explorer shit itself as frequently as I have this past three days since Windows ME.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[newgalactic]

That's one of the funniest sigs I've read in a while. btw, I'm also a born-again Christian.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[lattyware]

That's one of the funniest sigs I've read in a while. btw, I'm also a born-again Christian.

That's one of the funniest things I've read in a while.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[QuantumPion]

the cake is a lie
the cake is a lie
the cake is a lie

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[rs79]

" Cake, and grief counseling. "

Close but no cigar.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Dunkirk]

Dang it. We really need a meta-meta-moderation system around here for POST OF THE DAY!

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Machtyn]

a new favorite quote: If at first you don't succeed, you fail. -GLaDOS

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[DMUTPeregrine]

The cake is a lie. Pie doesn't lie.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[BurningFeetMan]

The cake is a lie!
Rinse repeat 5 times in blood.

Stupid /. compression filter. This is exactly what Portal is talking about. :(

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[VoltageX]

But with Vista, the cake is a lie.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Dragonslicer]

At the end, there will be free therapy. And Cake! Nobody will show up if there isn't punch and pie.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[pizpot]

Cake, and grief counseling...Vista's still a buggy bastard. I haven't seen Explorer shit itself as frequently as I have this past three days since Windows ME.

I tried vista on my HP pavillion before I returned it for lack of xp and linux sound drivers. It never even occured to me to use IE. Firefox worked nice. Winamp too. ICQ too. Looked really nice--congrats on whoever did the shine and compost. Apps ran quick enough. Windows admin tasks though... putt putt. That must be what turns people to think it is slow... they start tweaking and have to wait 2 secs for clicks. I only had it one day.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Skrapion]

I'll never be able to enjoy the cake without my Companion Clippy.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[petermgreen]

yeah lets be honest, the first thing a geek is going to do when he sits down at a new PC is to tweak it so it feels like home.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[psychicsword]

I have yet to see the "huge success" or any form of satisfaction.
And it is in no way good for all of us except the ones who are dead(we will be there soon).
They must be crying over this mistake
Although it is now a gun you could install it on all enemy computers and destroy their data networks
We must keep experimenting on those who are still alive.

I'm not even angry Well that makes one of us!

And we're out of beta we're releasing on time. Not the case for the magical SP1!
BTW I have most of the song memorized now ^.^

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Phishcast]

Come on now, this is insightful? An insightful mod makes this look like a personal attack on the guy rather than an attempt at humor. Put the personal beliefs aside and mod it funny if anything else, sheesh.

Re:Welcome to Windows Vista

[Extradition]

Lmao, this should have been modded Funny!

Figures...

[snowraver1]

And that is one of many reasons we are all still running XP

Re:Figures...

[z0M6]

Or simply left windows behind.

Actual info...

[EveryNickIsTaken]

From TFA:

...occurs when a Vista user (running Kaspersky Anti Virus 6 or 7) tries to copy a large number of files (~16,400). So if you're like most people in the world, and have never touched Kaspersky AV (or Vista, for that matter), then this is a non-issue.

Re:Actual info...

[Phil246]

actually, fta:

Although the problem occurs where users are running Kaspersky security products, it's a kernel leak that lies at the root of problem (the problem's not confined to systems running Kaspersky software, that just that this application seems to exacerbate the issue).

Re:Actual info...

[philg8]

The underlying problem is a Windows OLE component memory leak. Microsoft has a hotfix for the issue at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us

Re:Actual info...

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Even spending 5 seconds googling this issue would tell you that this only occurs when the user is running Kaspersky. The blogger that posted about this added his two cents in, which is factually incorrect.

Re:Actual info...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the bug is in the shell, not the kernel and only files with altnerate data streams trigger the leak. The KB article that Adrian links to states that very clearly, but he's been on an anti-Windows rampage lately that's blinded him to the facts.

Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem.

Re:Actual info...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If it is *just* kapersky that causes the problem, then why is MS issuing a hotfix instead of kapersky?

Re:Actual info...

[Anonymous Coward]

However, few other apps besides Kaspersky triggers it. Two posts up this thread you were saying that only Kapersky triggers it and you were criticising the submitter for not realising that. Now you say that a few other apps also trigger it. Care to change your story again?

Re:Actual info...

[DamnStupidElf]

Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem.

So it's Kaspersky's fault that alternate data streams are apparently no longer supported by Vista, despite being a basic part of NTFS?

Re:Actual info...

[truthsearch]

only files with altnerate data streams trigger the leak

Well that's what you get for crossing the streams. Egon warned us. Kaspersky's risking total protonic reversal. I guess they were fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing.

Re:Actual info...

[dannannan]

Vista has horrible "out of memory" problems even without Kaspersky AV. I used to use Vista at work (used to work at MSFT) and I have a Vista machine at home (as soon as I have a chance I'm gonna flatten it and put on Ubuntu). Here are some of the problems I've been having that sound like TFA, and we're talking about straight up out-of-the-box installs here:

- tabs in dialogs disappearing when you click on them
- IE7 can't open a new window or tab (just flashes and disappears, or crashes) once you have 20-30 web pages open (my wife always has 3 different email accounts + several knitting blogs open when I sit down to do anything, and that's usually putting it at the limit)
- right-click context menus don't appear when you right-click on the taskbar once you have too many windows open
- file copy "completed" but it really stopped partway through

All of these problems seem to crop up once you have enough windows / buttons / menus / etc. open in the apps on your desktop. The painful thing is that I have 2 GB of memory and it really does not take much to hit that limit. I bought a new computer this May just to run Vista, and it has reduced $3500 of hardware to a steaming pile.

I have a Debian box with 512 MB of RAM sitting next to the Vista box at home and it looks more and more capable every day.

I don't even want to think about the next version of Windows unless it's called "Min"dows, and I hear that the entire engineering effort went into giving it a code liposuction.

Re:Actual info...

[mysticgoat]

Hmmm.

If info in parent post is true, it suggests that Microsoft was not quite as careful in setting up one of the backdoors as they should have been.

Of course that's always a problem with backdoors. They have to be non-obvious to avoid detection, so they need to use more complex mechanisms than you'd find in straightforward coding. Combined with the need to keep the staff that knows about them as small as possible, you can't really debug them adequately, either. You'd think under these conditions, Microsoft would simply throw in the towel and compete honestly, on a level playing field. With their share of the market, they don't really need these clever, garage-start-up, entrepreneurial gimmicks any more.

But I guess Upper Management doesn't think that would be as much fun, or something.

Re:Actual info...

[gsking1]

Interesting. I used Kaspersky for some time (about 2 or 3 years ago) on XP and had all sorts of problems. I seem to remember something about these ADS and wonder if this problem was also on XP back then? This sort of virus scanning and crashing annoyance is one of the reasons I eventually migrated to Linux for all my personal use.

Re:Actual info...

[businessnerd]

Well if you have method for defeating Gozer that doesn't involve crossing the streams, I'd like to hear it. Until then, I'll stick with the Kaspersky Anti-Demigod suite.

Re:Actual info...

[hal2814]

Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things Downtown.

Re:Actual info...

[Lord Ender]

Thank you, sir. You made my day.

Re:Actual info...

[SL Baur]

Microsoft said it. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us

SYMPTOMS
When you try to copy files from a Windows Vista-based computer to another computer by using Windows Explorer, you may receive the following error message:

Out of memory
There is not enough memory to complete this operation.

This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:

• The files include extended attributes.
• You copy lots of files in a single operation.

CAUSE
This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files. That sounds like two separate bugs as the "lots of files in a single operation" sounds more like overflowing a fixed size array than anything else.

Re:Actual info...

[Foolhardy]

First of all, the issue is how Explorer handles extended attributes (EAs), which are distinct from alternate data streams (ADSes). The kernel and NTFS have always provided full support for EAs and ADSes (since NT 3.1). Explorer (and for that matter Win32) has never had very good support for ADSes, and almost nonexistent support for EAs. EAs were implemented in support of the OS/2 subsystem. ADSes are the 'official' way to attach metadata to a file, and scale better than EAs. The only Win32 functions that have ever provided access to EAs are the BackupRead and BackupWrite functions which are designed to handle all metadata on a file transparently. Looking at the imports from shell32.dll to ntdll.dll on Vista, it looks like the shell bypasses Win32 when dealing with EAs, invoking the syscalls NtQueryEaFile and NtSetEaFile directly (bypassing API layers like this is something Microsoft tells ISVs is a big no-no).

This is just Yet Another Windows 95 shell bug (yes Vista uses the same shell architecture ported through each version from Win95). It is not the end of support for EAs or ADSes. If anything, it's a belated attempt at better support, done poorly. The shell has always been, IMO, one of the lower quality windows components, especially when it comes to properly interfacing with lower layers. This bug does not surprise me. I've been using robocopy for nontrivial file transfer for a while now.

Re:Actual info...

[ultranova]

That sounds like two separate bugs as the "lots of files in a single operation" sounds more like overflowing a fixed size array than anything else.

That wouldn't cause an Out of Memory error, but a General Protection Fault or something.

More likely the copy operation allocates some data structure for each file as it is copied (possibly only if it has extended attributes), and only deallocates it after the whole operation is completed, as opposed to directly after the particular file has been copied. That would cause the memory usage to go up constantly during the copy operation and cause it to run out if the number of files is large.

Re:Actual info...

[tcc3]

Cats and dogs....living together!

Re:Actual info...

[drspliff]

Because it's like saying: "If you drive 4x4 on gravel it's wheels fall off, so you just stop people from driven on gravel".

Yeah, bad analogy, but the problem is with a Microsoft product's bad handling, not with Kaspercy.

Re:Actual info...

[recoiledsnake]

Way to misrepresent his post. There is a difference between "few" and "a few". Few and little mean not many/much-- they are negative in connotation. I am sad because I have few friends. A few and a little mean some-- they are positive in connotation. I just moved here, but I am happy because I have a few friends.

Re:Actual info...

[DamnStupidElf]

Thank you for the correction, I hadn't realized extended attributes were independent of the ADS mechanism.

I imagine that the shell probably uses IFileOperations internally, so is the bug in the API or explorer.exe? What about FileCopyEx? Even though extended attributes are a legacy feature it's kind of hard to claim that they are supported if they're buggy and a patch doesn't make it into the first major service pack...

Re:Actual info...

[whereiswaldo]

'Cause they're Packin' the K, BITCH!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bHxyHlFZ778

Re:Actual info...

[julesh]

Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem.

This is blatantly false. Many, many files have alternate data streams, because MS use them to implement some core Windows features:

* Any file downloaded from the Internet by Internet Explorer has one
* Any file with metadata set using the shell has one

There are probably other cases I'm not aware, but these two certainly exist.

And I can see at least one reason why an ordinary user might have a directory containing 16,000 files of the first kind (ahem).

Re:Actual info...

[master_p]

Too bad for Microsoft to have to hide a fine O/S (NT) under a shitty API (Win32).

Re:Actual info...

[Malc]

That's got to be annoying hasn't it? Doesn't Windows prompt about loss of information when copying/moving files with alternative data streams to files systems that don't support them? Most people won't even know or understand what Windows is going on about, or whether they're about to lose legitimate data or not.

Re:Actual info...

[Malc]

I've seen a rather nasty prank where an apparently zero byte file consumes all remaining disk space by having very large alternate data stream(s). It's rather hard to find the culprit using Explorer.

Vista

[MyLongNickName]

When I copy a bunch of files from one directory to another, I get 'Explorer has stopped working and must restart'. I've resorted to using DOS to copy the files. I wish I had stuck with 2000 Server :)

Re:Vista

[Strudelkugel]

I have 13K+ music tracks on a backup disk. If I try to copy them with the Explorer UI, it does nothing - No error message or anything. I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine. You must be doing the same thing. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that? ;-)

Re:Vista

[The13thSin]

Actually, unless you use the new robocopy under vista, this will not negate the problem listed in the article (I know, cos I've known of this problem for quite some time in Vista). I think your error has to do with something else.

Re:Vista

[MightyMartian]

I use xcopy mainly, simply because I'm sufficiently familiar with all the command line arguments that I don't have to hunt down a help file. Explorer is okay for some things, but it's a rather shitty file manager all in all.

Re:Vista

[howlingmadhowie]

once more we have the typical error diagnostic under windows: "i think your error has to do with something else" (don't worry, i'm not poking fun at you, i'm just poking fun at the ridiculousmess of this sentence).

Re:Vista

[Vexor]

I've been using Vista Premium for 6 months now and I've yet to have a single problem. I think a lot of the FUD from the news sites is blind prejudice against MS. I'm not a MS fanboy either.

Re:Vista

[SatanicPuppy]

The thing that bothers me about it is, for business use, it's not at all uncommon to have twice that many files lying around on your systems. My desktops routinely have a lot more than that, and running into a situation where I can't copy files at all without having to break them down into little groups, is just unacceptable from a business standpoint.

Re:Vista

[Waffle Iron]

I've resorted to using DOS to copy the files.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't use GUI file managers to move around more than ~100 files on *any* OS. They always seem to have have a wishy-washy feel, with a lot more effort put into drawing moving icons of floating documents than into ensuring correctness or error handling beyond "freeze the UI".

If there's a big tree of files to move, it's time to break out real tools like rsync.

Re:Vista

[cc22dd]

I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine.

Robocopy is the command line utility from the Win XP resource kit cd, right? That might be good for pros, but I recently found this little utility (free for personal use) called TeraCopy via Lifehacker. Once installed, this becomes the default copy handler for Windows explorer and does an amazing job. It lets you pause and resume copying, and has error recovery too. It even is smart enough to recognize if I've started a copy operation and then try to copy more files by adding the new files to the previous copy job! I have been astonished by the speed of copying large number of files between disks after I started using this. If this small company can make this efficient utility that integrates so well into Windows, I say shame on M$.

Re:Vista

[kv9]

I for one can't believe that there are people that DO NOT use Total Commander, like $DEITY intended. seriously, get with the fucking program. it's bad enough that you're stuck with Losedows, at least you should make your lives a bit easier.

Re:Vista

[kv9]

once more we have the typical error diagnostic under windows: "i think your error has to do with something else" (don't worry, i'm not poking fun at you, i'm just poking fun at the ridiculousmess of this sentence).

in other words...

(i am poking fun at him)

Re:Vista

[ozbird]

Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that? ;-)

After squirting their music all over the place, their mommy won't let them play any more until they clean up the whole DRM mess.

Re:Vista

[Boronx]

I've had a ton of operations fail silently in Vista. What's going on here? Isn't that the first commandment of coding "Thou shalt deal with error conditions and thy user shall be informed of them"?

Is it amateur hour at Microsoft or am I missing something?

Re:Vista

[GPL Apostate]

There's a fairly nice port of Midnight Commander to Win32 that you can run.

I like xcopy, too, but there are those times when you just want to point at something and hit a key to have things move from one place to another.

Re:Vista

[cookd]

Wow, I must have gotten the extra special version, cuz my Vista certainly does include xcopy.

---

C:\>xcopy /?
Copies files and directory trees.

NOTE: Xcopy is now deprecated, please use Robocopy.

---

Though I can't believe it can be considered a replacement for xcopy.

Re:Vista

[dargaud]

Robocopy is one of the best MS command line utility around (I guess it had different programmers than EdLin). I use it all the time for backups. It's easy to script (copy only files that have changed on whole disk, excluding some directories, excluding .bak files... and plenty more options). It does come with some versions of Windows or power packs, otherwise you need to track down the download page on MS website. And unlike copy, xcopy and such, it can copy UNC (\\network) paths. And it's regularly updated too.

Re:Vista

[SEMW]

I've resorted to using DOS to copy the files I hope you mean the NT command line interpreter (cmd.exe) and not the actual DOS virtual machine (COMMAND.COM). (Apologies if you did mean cmd; but I've seen people confuse the two surprisingly often).

Re:Vista

[nojomofo]

I just wonder wtf is wrong with this world. WHY ARE WE USING WINDOWS? It's 2007, and we're discussing which FILE COPY utility to use because Microsoft can't even copy a f**king file! This is ridiculous. Unbelievable.

Re:Vista

[Doctor O]

I advise everyone to STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM TERACOPY! I mean hey, look at the screenshot of the full version, it says it is copying Morcheeba's album "The Antidote", while the songs clearly are from the album "Charango", PLUS they're in the wrong order!

Also, everyone knows that "Big Calm" is the best Morcheeba album, ever. So not only does the tool fuck up everything, it doesn't have any taste, either.

Savages. Probably they aren't even circumcised.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[gbulmash]

Isn't it a little odd that if you strip off the first and last digits of the number "16,400", it's 640, as in 'no one needs more than 640k"?

No more going back to XP?

[dtouchet]

M$ is scared that people will try to copy their documents to another computer before reverting back to XP. Smart, very smart Micro$oft! On a tech note, what kind of number is 14,600? I would have thought 16,384 would be better.

Re:No more going back to XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I would have thought 16,384 would be better.

It probably is 16384.

"16400" is clueless technical writerspeak for "The developer said '16,384', and the style guide says to use three significant digits".

(Alternate explanation: "The developer said '0x4000', and the style guide says 'convert to decimal' as well as 'if it's not a round number, use three significant digits'")

There are enclued technical writers, but 16400 is so close to 16384 that it makes me suspect that the author of the MSKB article isn't one of them.

Re:No more going back to XP?

[KlomDark]

14,600K is 16,385.

Just kidding, don't do the math.

(Although I actually just did thinking "Am I on to something?" Darn!)

Re:No more going back to XP?

[Machtyn]

well, the round off error for pi on a galactic scale is 3. You need to use a galactic scale of numbers when talking about the storage and memory needs of Vista. So, 16400 is a close enough approximation for 16384. Really, I don't know why they didn't round off to 20k. ---- If at first you don't succeed, you fail. -GLaDOS (Portal from Valve Software)

Re:No more going back to XP?

[Gabrill]

The rest is overhead for DRM.

Re:No more going back to XP?

[Protonk]

Win.

you are probably absolutely right. this does seem like a style guide fatality to me. :(

Re:No more going back to XP?

[Damocles the Elder]

TFA said that it breaks "~16,400". Now, it might be 16,384, it might not. However, I don't know about you, but I'm not going to say "Oh! It broke! Time to count the number of files that got copied over..."

Kidding aside, take a look at the screenshot provided. 17,899 files post-copy.

Re:No more going back to XP?

[laejoh]

Just as if 11 is soooo close to 10. It might appear so, but, as Nigel says, it's still one more, innit? It's not 10! It goes to 11!

Cumulative copies!

[WPIDalamar]

I was thinking "big deal", who copies that many files at once?

Then I read it's cumulative between reboots! I can imagine this will hit many servers that have any kind of auto-copy job they do on a schedule.

Re:Cumulative copies!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

If you are using Vista as a server, you pretty much deserve what ever happens to you.

Re:Cumulative copies!

[cnettel]

It only appears to affect full copying with GUI. xcopy, that actually uses quite a bit of the underlying API, seems not to be affected. Although it IS possible to script jobs through COM objects and the shell, I don't think any sanely configured server will have it done that way.

Re:Cumulative copies!

[suv4x4]

If you are using Vista as a server, you pretty much deserve what ever happens to you.

Correct, what about just 4 months from now, when Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 come out, and they *share the same codebase*.

And also 70% of the coding jobs in US now are related to .NET, hence Windows Server.

Lots of fun ahead.

Re:Cumulative copies!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Cooperations have thus far resisted the temptation to upgrade the clients, hopefully they will exercise the same caution in upgrading the mission critical servers as well. One can hope. Are you sure about that 70% metric? I guess I should be glad I'm in the minority, if thats true. Coincidently today I had a problem with a server that required me to change ( small tweak) the source code. Rare ( the second time in 5 years), but man I can't imagine working any other way now.

Refresh of an oldie...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (an Intel Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my ancient Mac running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista PC that has run faster than its Mac OSX counterpart, despite the Vista PC's same chip architecture. My 286/12 with 2 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.4ghz mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

Vista lovers, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Frosty Piss]

God what an ass kiss! I mean, read that post in the context of Slashdot:

I don't want to start a holy war here

And...

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems

And...

Vista lovers, flame me if you'd like...

I'm sorry, but if you where not going for "holy war", than you where going for what essentially constitutes a Slashdot Blowjob. Zero meaningful content, AC.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[mymaxx]

You have a problem either with your installation or with something you've installed. I run Vista on my Dell XPS, with a C2D, 3 GB RAM and I can complete multiple DVD size copies in the same amount of time. Perhaps you haven't installed the reliability fixes they released recently?

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Anonymous Coward]

Beautiful - got some bites too. Warms the cockles of this Mac lover's heart.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[howlingmadhowie]

if we suppose that reliability fixes will solve this problem, i'm just amazed that a problem this blatant could make it through quality control.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[RobertM1968]

No, what's really humorous is that the VIRTUALLY EXACT SAME POST (substitute Linux for OSX & OS9, change a couple of the system specs - otherwise identical) was modded flamebait while this was modded informative.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=329765&cid=20999373

Neat, huh? I love consistent moderation! Or perhaps we should ask what that says of /. mods of late? Is Linux (or Ubuntu Linux in particular) on the way out of /. mod's favs - and being replaced with OSX/OS9?

All in all, I think it funny! As is this post! Really! I swear!

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[wwahammy]

Does your motherboard have an nVidia nForce chipset? I had a problem with incredibly slow hard drive transfer rates when I got Vista and I traced it down to the built in bus mastering controller driver. Apparently nVidia decided that a really crappy, early release driver from June of 06 is all that should be on Windows Update. I went to nvidia.com, installed the driver and after the restart my transfer rates were between MUCH faster.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[mjorkerina]

My my my. It's just an old troll /macro, nothing serious. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22I+don't+want+to+start+a+holy+war+here%2C+but+what+is+the+deal+%22&btnG=Search Usually it was a humorous troll against the mac community but it seems Vista is now deserving the same treatment.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[carlcmc]

We are forced to consider this response a serious response ... which is difficult to due.

To believe in this day and age that someone falls for the classic 'my mac sucks' troll is truly humbling.

If this is indeed a repsonse with tongue placed firmly in cheek, the believability would be enhanced with just a hint as to your true intention.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Lord Ender]

Neat, huh? I love consistent moderation! Or perhaps we should ask what that says of /. mods of late?

Or perhaps, and I realize this is hard to wrap your head around, "the mods" are not an organized, solitary group; but are actually just an unrelated collection of thousands of people around the world, all with different opinions and backgrounds?

Contrary to the beliefs many young slashdot posters with fragile egos (I was among that group some nine years ago), getting downmodded is not a personal insult, and does not mean some collective "they" hates you or is out to get you. Also, getting in to the mod club and getting to post at +2 doesn't change your life in any way. You'll still be too shy to talk to the girl who smiles at you from across the bar, you'll still get routinely fragged by punk-ass 13-year-old, your parents will still give you shit for not attending church anymore, and you still need to get your oil changed every 3,000 miles. Slashdot moderation just isn't that big a deal.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Pope]

Neat, huh? I love consistent moderation! Or perhaps we should ask what that says of /. mods of late? Is Linux (or Ubuntu Linux in particular) on the way out of /. mod's favs - and being replaced with OSX/OS9?

You do realize that we (slashdot readers/posters) are the moderators, right?

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Das Modell]

The Slashdot moderating system is broken because it substitutes irrational knee-jerk downmodding for rational arguments. On conventional forums people at least have to make the effort of telling you to go fuck yourself, and they can't do it 100% anonymously and without any consequences, since everything they say is tied to their account, which can be banned if necessary.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[jammindice]

I agree, file operations in vista are horribly slow. I manage 2003/xp networks and work on a vista laptop and i would like someone (working for microsoft) how they can make extracting files soooo sloooowwww... on a celeron (POS) with xp and 256mb ram a ~20mb zip archive will extract in a few minutes... that same archive takes almost 10 minutes or more on vista with much much much better hardware/ram... how can you downgrade things like this? i thought it was supposed to be newer == faster i guess not anymore (at least with windows). these things are utterly retarded moves for microsoft to make... so now whenever i need to unzip something i use any xp computer i can find before i use my vista to do it..

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[HarvardAce]

No, what's really humorous is that the VIRTUALLY EXACT SAME POST (substitute Linux for OSX & OS9, change a couple of the system specs - otherwise identical) was modded flamebait while this was modded informative.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=329765&cid=20999373

Neat, huh? I love consistent moderation! Or perhaps we should ask what that says of /. mods of late? Is Linux (or Ubuntu Linux in particular) on the way out of /. mod's favs - and being replaced with OSX/OS9? I normally don't feed trolls, but here goes:

The original post (in this thread) was clearly meant as a satire based upon the post that you also dug up. The post is now showing as funny instead of informative, but often you'll find informative or interesting mods on funny posts as an additional satire, which in itself is often quite funny (e.g. seeing a clearly nonsense but otherwise funny post modded as informative is often funny). Regardless, this post is funny, not because of the content alone, but because it is poking fun at a fairly infamous post in /.'s history. It's all about intent!

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Zarel]

Other people have already pointed out that the group "Slashdot mods" consist of more than one person, so I'll just skip straight to pointing out that this is a very old and common Slashdot joke (Google reports 54 results). I can't find the original Slashdot posting, but it appears to originate from this 1998 blog post.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[RobertM1968]

Or perhaps, and I realize this is hard to wrap your head around, "the mods" are not an organized, solitary group; but are actually just an unrelated collection of thousands of people around the world, all with different opinions and backgrounds?

First, (and I think I indicated it enough times), the post was intended as (ironic) humor. Maybe I should have posted it a few more times.

Second, my original account is from literally the first days of /. - so I am well aware of how it works.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[QuantumFTL]

the VIRTUALLY EXACT SAME POST (...snip...) was modded flamebait while this was modded informative.

Mods on slashdot often mod "Funny" posts "Informative" because it gives Karma, unlike Funny, which many people believe *should* give Karma.

I don't think anyone actually believes Vista is slower than an 8 year old mac. Although the 8 year old mac will probably *not* run out of memory in this situation :)

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[DragonWriter]

The Slashdot moderating system is broken because it substitutes irrational knee-jerk downmodding for rational arguments.

If the mods are using the powers in "irrational, kneejerk" ways, what makes you think that any other response they would make to the same post would be any more rational?

and they can't do it 100% anonymously and without any consequences, since everything they say is tied to their account, which can be banned if necessary.

Lots of forums (including Slashdot) allow comments to be posted without being tied to a user account.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[hondo77]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics?

I knew you were putting us on when I saw "Vista fantatics". Might as well have said "Martians".

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[ConceptJunkie]

if we suppose that reliability fixes will solve this problem, i'm just amazed that a problem this blatant could make it through quality control.

You must be new to Microsoft products.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Das Modell]

If the mods are using the powers in "irrational, kneejerk" ways, what makes you think that any other response they would make to the same post would be any more rational?

If they actually had to post something, there's a chance they'd make some sort of argumentative effort, and you could explain to them how wrong they are. At the very least you'd have something to reply to.

Lots of forums (including Slashdot) allow comments to be posted without being tied to a user account.

I've visited very few forums where anonymous or guest posting is allowed. Disabling anonymous posting on Slashdot would be a pretty good idea.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[dlanod]

Funny, exaggerated, but somewhat true. I got a new computer after the hard drive and RAM died consecutively in my old system. Much to my aprehension it came with Vista preinstalled, but so far I'm not having any major problems with one exception. Games are working fine (the system is a significant upgrade from my old computer, so that obviously affects my perceptions) and the full screen "Allow this?" prompts are bearable now that I'm through the initial upgrade/reinstall everything phase.

However, my main complaint with it is that file copying in Vista is still pretty terrible. It can take forever to calculate "remaining time", according to the progress bar. It will randomly stall halfway through a large copy and won't cancel. I've had to kill Explorer to clear the progress bars if this happens. If you don't remember to make sure your current login is marked as an owner of all the files being copied it will take three times as long. This is on non-network copies of 500MB-40GB worth of files. Thankfully 90% of this is behind me now that I've got most of everything where I want it, but it really doesn't leave the best impression on you when you start running a new OS.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[RobertM1968]

Well, on the same level equipment (ie: Vista on an equivalent Wintel box) it is ;-)

I'm thinking maybe I should pre-mod my posts so that /. moderators know my intent and where to start... such as +1 Funny

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[RobertM1968]

I'd hope I realize that since I moderate once every 10 days or so.

C'mon, in my original post, I even pointed out (more than once) how FUNNY I thought it was. Why my post was modded Informative, I dont know. I would have went with Off-Topic - or... perhaps funny.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[theapodan]

This sort of thing can actually happen if you don't have DMA enabled for your drives.

If you have verrry slow file copies, try enabling DMA.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[Jaxoreth]

Is Linux (or Ubuntu Linux in particular) on the way out of /. mod's favs - and being replaced with OSX/OS9?

I, for one, welcome our new OS-9-favoring moderator overlords.

Mac OS 9 doesn't get nearly the love it deserves these days. You barely hear a word said about it. It's almost as if people thought it was dead or something.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[StikyPad]

Congratulations, you've just become the latest victim of a rather old troll/joke. The fact that it's a nearly verbatim copy of an old troll makes it sort of funny. Also people occasionally mod Insightful or Interesting to boost karma, since the Funny mod carries no karma bonus.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[arb phd slp]

The only reason I read this thread was to find this post. I knew it would be here.

Re:Refresh of an oldie...

[NAshiqin]

Yeah, I totally agree with you. The well-known problem of insufficient memory when using Vista has already bugging me and my friends for quite some time now. Since, it's getting harder and harder to find original Windows XP CDs anywhere here, we're college students of a developing country have to spend a huge amount of money to upgrade or buy powerful laptops or desktops in order to use Vista. Even when using 1G RAM - it's still lagging at some point (copying file, move files etc.). Though the graphics is magnificent (which consumes a lot of the memory resources too) but the idea to suppress other vital functionalities over beautiful graphics is totally irrational.

It's because

[zsouthboy]

they can only send 16,000 files to the RIAA and MPAA to check, at once.

16400+ files ? Let me guess ...

[Ihlosi]

... the exact number is 16384 ?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Seismologist]

No, it stems from the "16,400 is more than what you'll ever need" argument.

How much Ram does Vista POS DRM System need??

[Joe The Dragon]

How much Ram does Vista POS DRM System need??

Re:How much Ram does Vista POS DRM System need??

[dragonsomnolent]

Well, Sitting idle (with only tasks in the system tray running A-V, pidgin, and a slew of new bells and whistles I never saw on XP) my 4 gig laptop (of which Vista says it can only use 3 because I'm running 32-bit) uses 40% of my RAM. So who knows ;) Can't wait until I have the time to get my wireless working under Linux.

Honest question

[Corporate Troll]

Why did you switch from a server class version to a desktop version of an operating system? Sounds like a bad choice in the first place.

Re:Honest question

[MyLongNickName]

I still use the server, but only for development work. I wanted a "family" computer for letting the wife and kids play on without worrying about what would get screwed up when I was in the middle of playing with something.

Doing something as simple as using a crossover cable to transfer data between the two turned into a nightmare as the "very intelligent" windows explorer dropped me to under 100K/sec download speeds. I have never seen anything so slow since the 90's.

Re:Honest question

[tepples]

A server kernel would use a fair scheduler for instance while a desktop one would want something that is more responsive (and quite possibly realtime in the case of audio/video applications) to user applications. Why can't a single kernel do both, with classes of processes for throughput or latency? I'd imagine that you want low latency in a live streaming audio or video server.

Re:Honest question

[tod_miller]

> I wanted a "family" computer for letting the wife and kids play on without worrying about what would get screwed up when I was in the middle of playing with something.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment, is it today, or 4 months ago, when this sentence now means you decided to get a ubuntu machine.

It is clear that ubuntu is for those who aren't technology up enough to want the latest unstable windows OS. Windows users should understand that not everyone wants last minute code changes on their computer, and they should look at improving usability, and not sneer at non-expert users.

Unless windows can appeal to those who want a family computer, it will never be able to compete with linux, whoch can offer a care free, credible and usable solution.

Sounds scary. But, actually, more true this way around. Its happened.

Critical mass. It is now officially more peace of mind to install ubuntu for your granny than it is to install any windows operating system.

Installing windows operating system immediately jeapardises your ability to manage and maintain the computer and ups the TCO, and gives you headaches trying to support this.

Thank you firefox, and thunderbird, and klotski.

A lot of people ask my advice when buying a computer, I admit I was always pushing linux, but always thinking 'gee they will need help'.

I see it as a huge, HUGE comprimise to not recommend linux now, and I am actually fearful if I ever have someone show up with a vista setup. Its alien. Unworkable.

I'd recommend a mac or a ubuntu laptop to anyone now, because, for everything, it is the most painfree, path of least resistance, solutions to computing needs.

Did anyone else see this yet in their own feelings towards 'the unclean masses'?

XP is perhaps the last M$ system that we can tolerate as the geek mob, helping and tweaking the computers for friends and family. enough. I have installed FF and TB on countless machines, never touched a M$ product in 2 years, converted hundreds to open office and FF *for the sheer selfish reason that I do not want problems*. No agenda.

Now Ubunu has filled that gap, its fire and forget, put it on their machine, here is firefox, here is calculator, there you go.

Want a "family" computer for letting the wife and kids play on without worrying about what would get screwed up??

There is only one choice now.

Re:Honest question

[MyLongNickName]

There is only one choice now.

What if the want to play Virtual Villagers? Or Outlook?

Re:Honest question

[DaveWick79]

That's what everyone was saying 8 months after XP came out too.

And now you give XP the title of last tolerable MS OS.

Ubuntu is fine if all someone is doing is going online (well most of the time, the poor saps who want to get on sites that use ActiveX controls are sometimes screwed over), getting email, and putting out an occasional letter. But the majority of people I recommend systems to also want to be able to play games and buy software and hardware off the shelf and install with minimal hassle. My business customers are unwilling to settle for something that does most of what they need to do, instead of everything they need to, just to save a few $$'s.

Re:Honest question

[GPL Apostate]

Certainly not! Windows 2000 was the last tolerable Microsoft OS. That truth will hold fast, from what I've seen over the last decade.

Re:Honest question

[petermgreen]

with XP while the activation pissed some people off only home users and small buisnesses who bought legit had to put up with it. Corps, educational establishments and pirates got a slightly different version which did not have that misfeature. Most of the rest of the bad things about XP were bugs and bloat. Bugs were fixed and bloat became less significant with time. Vista pushes it's activation on everyone except those prepared to buy big brand OEM and prepare seperate images for every brand of machine.

but sadly I suspect you are right, apps are king and once vista is the only version of windows that is reasonablly availible people will use it whether they like it or not.

Re:Honest question

[SEMW]

Possibly has to do with how the kernel is compiled for the different versions. A server kernel would use a fair scheduler for instance while a desktop one would want something that is more responsive (and quite possibly realtime in the case of audio/video applications) to user applications. At least that's how it works in the open source world... FWIW, in Windows (both server and desktop versions) you can switch between the two processor scheduling modes. The option's under System Properties -> Advanced tab -> Performance settings -> Processor scheduling. (I imagine it requires a reboot, but I haven't tried it).

Good thing?

[Frosty Piss]

but that 'often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly.'

I would think this is a good thing.

Re:Good thing?

[Chris Mattern]

No, it's not. When the file copy operation has failed, but you get little feedback that a failure has occurred, that's a very bad thing.

Chris Mattern

Re:Good thing?

[SuiteSisterMary]

'Little indication' would indicate that there is indication. It's better than 'no indication.' Or, worse, 'false indication.'

Re:Good thing?

[smoker2]

I really hope you don't run someone else's machines - seriously !
If you can't handle the English language you're going to have real trouble understanding a computer. And surprisingly, that has nothing to do with language, just your commitment to learning the environment.

Re:Good thing?

[MaXimillion]

"Very little indication" would mean that there is some. "Little indication" can mean that there's none.

The English language can be weird at times.

Re:Good thing?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Oh, I agree that the English language is quite weird (but not weirder than most others, in their own ways) and that many stock phrases and sayings often mean something other than what the words would indicate.

However, I've always used, and heard used, 'no indication' to indicate, well, no indications. Admittedly, 'little indication' tends to be more of a CYA phrase than anything else....

Exxon Val-Vista

[roadkill_cr]

Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it to let you copy 16,401 files!

This isn't a bug!

[Newer Guy]

It's a feature!

Re:Just wondering...

[808140]

Maybe you're backing up to an external hard drive?

Re:Just wondering...

[TimothyDavis]

I don't think your average user would do this.

I have learned that copying files using the UI in Vista is a very painful thing to do - even if you don't have 16K+ files.

Heaven forbid you ever extract files from a cab you found on the internet - it will ask you for confirmation for every single file, without the option of 'yes for all'.

It's NEVER too late to UPGRADE to XP !!

[Jerry]

Just about everyone is.

Re:It's NEVER too late to UPGRADE to XP !!

[JamesTRexx]

Aren't we supposed to upgrade to OSX/Linux/BSD as /. inhabitants?

BTW, aren't you tired from running such a long time? (strike one alcohol induced bad joke from my to-do list)

Re:Only when running Kaspersky

[Phil246]

where in those two quotes, or tfa does it say "only when running kaspersky"?

Re:Just wondering...

[MyLongNickName]

Yes It will. It is called 'do the same for all files' or something similar. Apparently the old style confirmation was too simple.

Really?

[beatmania]

I just recently moved over 20,000 files from one drive to another, both drives are SATA drives (using Vista Enterprise, Japanese version) and I didn't have a problem...I assume that this bug was found on English Vista.....anyone else using another region's Vista have this problem?

Re:Really?

[recoiledsnake]

The files must include extended attributes to trigger this bug. I guess your's did not have those.

What about those of us who need high performance?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I want an OS that lets me re-organize my pr0n anytime I want. I *need* to be able to select 50K-100K files at a time and move them from place to place without slowdowns. Ever try, in Windows, to search your network for all the *.jpg files, select a few hundred thousand of them in the search window, and drag them to the new firewire disk you just plugged in? It's painful, lemme tell ya.

Anybody want to suggest an OS that would work for me? I'm serious.

OLE mem leak; only affects 'extended attrib' files

[I'm Don Giovanni]

According to the cited "hotfix" link, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us , the problem is due to an OLE memory link when dealing with files that have "extended attributes".

This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:
  * The files include extended attributes.
  * You copy lots of files in a single operation.

CAUSE
This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files.

Is this related to the playing music and network..

[Joe The Dragon]

Is this related to the playing music and network file copy slow down bug as well?

Of course file management is secondary...

[Huntr]

.. when your GUI is using 2 gigs of RAM.

Re:Of course file management is secondary...

[Zebra_X]

Yeah - no. DWM.exe uses 32M of memory.

I'm using 1.09G W/ Trillian 4 Alpha, Winamp, VS.NET, IE, PowerPoint w/ 26 slide deck open, and outlook running. I don't really consider that atrocious for a next generation OS.

Re:Of course file management is secondary...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I've see windows Vista 64 eat 4 gigs of my 8 gigs while vista is not doing a dam thing.

Re:Of course file management is secondary...

[sqrt(2)]

But it is doing stuff. It's using that extra, unused memory to cache stuff that you're likely to need access to quickly. It's just superfetch doing its job. Unused memory is wasted memory. If you suddenly start doing something that requires all that memory, Vista relinquishes it and lets that app/game have it. Vista itself isn't using half your memory, it's caching your web browser, start menu, documents folder, and other things so that they open quicker. You can even turn off superfetch if you want to, it's a service.

Re:Of course file management is secondary...

[StikyPad]

My system boots uTorrent, @home client (with 2 tasks), Avast, Comodo Firewall, and I typically have Outlook and Firefox open (with 10+ tabs), which brings memory usage to ~80% with 2GB of RAM, and 300 odd megs paged out. I'd wager that quite a few people have a very similar setup, with the possible exception of the @home client, which uses nearly 250MB on its own.

Opening new applications, or switching to one that's been paged out (aka not the active Window) is agonizingly slow, and that's with torrents on a separate array from the OS/Program Files. I popped in another 2GB, however, and all is well. I now have 0 page file usage and rarely go above 50% unless I have a game open. So yeah, the window manager doesn't require 2GB, but (what I consider to be) an average setup will easily chew up that much.

Bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I call sensationalist bullshit. I just moved 20000+ files across a network connection to my Vista laptop about 2 or 3 hours ago without the hotfix applied. Memory usage does not appear to have increased at all from the typical baseline, and all files are present and accounted for.

Even though I plan to slap Ubuntu on this laptop the moment I hear linux has perfect power management support for it, I still have given Vista a fair shake. Methinks this has little to do with Vista itself and more to do with antivirus products sucking, as they always have. I've got no love for an industry that can only keep itself afloat by never perfectly solving the problem it exists to solve.

I'm a little suspicious

[Sycraft-fu]

The reason being is I've setup a Vista system and copied about 100,000 files (totaling about 60GB) drive to drive in a single operation, without error. So while I'm not saying this isn't a Vista error, I'm wondering what else has to be done to trigger it. The persisting across reboots, even if you break it down smaller really makes it sound like another program is somehow interfering with the copy. I'll have to mess around with it at work, we have Vista test machines and Cadence installs north of 250,000 files when you install its libraries. I know it installs fine, though that isn't a copy strictly speaking as it is files being extracted from archives.

I'm just wondering if perhaps there isn't more to this than just "OMG Vista runs out of memory!" If it is a memory issue, why then haven't I encountered it, doing far larger amounts of files?

Re:I'm a little suspicious

[coolnicks]

KB 942435:

This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files. Its only files with streams, and apparently kaspersky makes it wose by that fact that it tags every single file with a stream.

Re:I'm a little suspicious

[dhasenan]

It's not persistent *across* reboots, but *between* them. So you copy 5000 files and reboot and copy another 5000 and reboot...do that as much as you want and it's fine. But try it without the reboot, and you still crash.

Re:I'm a little suspicious

[mysticalreaper]

From TFHA (The Fine Hotfix Article):
This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:
        The files include extended attributes.
        You copy lots of files in a single operation.

Did your file use extended attributes? If not, you probably didn't trigger the bug.

As they explain:
CAUSE
This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files.

Re:I'm a little suspicious

[jayp00001]

Try copying 60GB of MP3s

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[purpledinoz]

How the F%$^ can this be a problem? A file copy is a simple operation. There's simply no excuse for this... This should have never been a problem in the first place. What pisses me off is that I need to buy a new laptop, Vista is now forced down my throat, and I have no option to get XP pre-installed.

Same as NT

[Vadim Makarov]

When I discovered a similar bug in Windows NT eight years ago (incomplete copying a large directory tree, silent), I installed FAR and haven't bothered with using Windows Explorer for any important stuff ever since. It makes me glad skills learned years ago are still useful: I'm using FAR in Vista.

Re:Same as NT

[rbanzai]

Hmmm... FAR appears to be Norton Commander.

I loved Norton Commander when I first used it in the 1980s. It was so easy to use, and fast.

Re:Same as NT

[Predathar]

I used to use the file manager that came with DOS 5.0 or 6.0 (don't remember) until someone showed me Norton Commander.. WOW! Now I use Total Commander (previously Window's Commander) and it's amazing. Always the first program I open when I log into Windows and I do ALL my file handling with that.

Re:Same as NT

[janeil]

Or Midnight Commander, good old mc, as it appears on linux and unix systems. I wonder how old this program is and who wrote it originally? This is and always has been one of the greatest utilities ever. Such a pleasure to see directories appear immediately on a keystroke, while windows explorer gets slower and slower since win95.

Re:Same as NT

[innocent_white_lamb]

Unfortunately, some of the mc function keys conflict with the default gnome-terminal keybindings.

Re:Same as NT

[CronoCloud]

If you open up Help in mc with F1 and then cursor down to "Authors" and hit return it will give you a list.

Amazed

[JustNiz]

Amazing that Microsoft are so short-sighted that they don't consider this important enough to include the fix in SP1.
Think of the potential loss of important files just because this thing doesn't report when it fails.
OK 16400 is a lot of files but its not unrealistic number. Just my windows directory alone has about 15800 files (not that I would want to copy it).
I just hope this bug directly adversely affects enough managers that make purchasing decisions to drive a few more to adopt Linux as a company-wide platform instead of windows.

Re:Amazed

[hey]

My c:\windows has 41,006
Using 8G.
Yes, this is Vista.
What a pig.

Re:Only when running Kaspersky

[mymaxx]

TFA is wrong. Read the MS support page.

So they use 14 bits for the file indexes?

[9gezegen]

2^14 is 16384, so Vista uses 14 bits in its for loop for copy. The question is why? even signed integers are 15 bits in old systems so are they using 1 bit for other purpose?

Re:So they use 14 bits for the file indexes?

[guruevi]

The Evil Bit? I can imagine 14 bits + 1 parity bit + 1 DRM-bit. But who the heck still uses 16-bit? DOS? Oh, yeah, we're talking about Windows here, maybe they're back to going to real mode, using INT13 for stuff like this?

Re:So they use 14 bits for the file indexes?

[pclminion]

2^14 is 16384, so Vista uses 14 bits in its for loop for copy. The question is why? even signed integers are 15 bits in old systems so are they using 1 bit for other purpose?

I don't think that's likely. More likely, there is a table somewhere that can hold 16384 entries (what they are, I have no idea). Programmers like powers of 2, so a table of fixed size 16384 isn't unusual. For some reason, when this table becomes full, things explode. Just a guess.

Re:So they use 14 bits for the file indexes?

[oh2]

Considering that this is a Microsoft product they probably use two evil bits just to make sure...

not 16,400

[Spy der Mann]

Very probably it's 16,384, as in 2^14. I'm sure it was a hardcoded limit. So typical, Microsoft... so typical.

Re:not 16,400

[phobos13013]

Actually its probably because of the 8^4.666666666666666666666..... floating point

Re:not 16,400

[davidsyes]

Maybe they ate their own dog food and used the troubled hexed-cell (excel) to generate the copying limits. Some bad rows and columns, and voila! Perpetual problems.

Re:not 16,400

[Spy der Mann]

Wow, there's about a dozen of these posts, and THEY'RE ALL FUCKING WRONG! CAN'T YOU READ?

Your powers of observation continue to serve you well. B-)

Mine don't :(

Re:not 16,400

[0xABADC0DA]

for x in $(seq 1 16400); do touch filename.$x; done
mkdir copy
cp filename.* copy/
bash: /bin/cp: Argument list too long

All these artificial limits are stupid and sure Vista is even more broken, but Unix has had this kind of problem for decades and instead of fixing it (ala plan 9) they just came up with stuff to work around it (xargs).

Re:What about those of us who need high performanc

[Parag2k3]

Linux. For all of your pr0n handling needs.

How much effect does Kaspersky have?

[RootWind]

Did it make it 10-fold worse? 100-fold? 1000-fold? Did they just not have enough files to find out what the limit for just the kernel leak without KAV is?

Bad summery

[gravis777]

Apparently the submitter skimmed the article, and decided to post up a Vista bash on Slashdot.

FTA:

The "Out of Memory" error (which is affectionately known at the PC Doc HQ as the "Out of Cheese" error ... don't ask why ...) is one of the biggest and most baffling of Vista's file handling problems has been occurs when a Vista user (running Kaspersky Anti Virus 6 or 7) tries to copy a large number of files (~16,400) Apparently its just a problem with this antivirus program running in Vista. I move large amounts of files around in Vista quite often (granted, its Vista 64), sometimes well over 20,000 files at a time, and have never run into this issue.

Re:Bad summery

[gravis777]

Sorry, hit submit before finishing my comment. The article also states that the problem lies in the Kernel, but it seems to only pop up with this one antivirus program.

Although the problem occurs where users are running Kaspersky security products, it's a kernel leak that lies at the root of problem (the problem's not confined to systems running Kaspersky software, that just that this application seems to exacerbate the issue).

Re:Bad summery

[John Hasler]

> Apparently its just a problem with this antivirus program running in Vista.

You are claiming that the antivirus program patches the Vista kernel? The copy utility?

Re:Bad summery

[MartBrooks]

Also FTA: "(the problem's not confined to systems running Kaspersky software, that just that this application seems to exacerbate the issue)."

Re:Bad summery

[dhasenan]

+++ Out of Cheese Error +++
From Discworld. A magical computer powered by ants issued that error occasionally, along with a Divide By Cucumber error.

Re:Bad summery

[mysticgoat]

Yes, for Vista it has certainly been a bad summery. The forecast for the upcoming wintery doesn't look so good, either.

Pun-ishments aside, those who RATFA know that the fault is in the Vista kernel, it is consistently triggered by Kapersky, but is also triggered by other software, and by implication it is not consistently repeatable and therefore cannot be easily worked around.

On my WinXP home machine, I routinely copy more than 16,400 files when doing a full data backup to an external drive, which I do two or three nights a week. Even if Vista was perfect in every other way, this would be a show-stopper for me.

Re:Bad summery

[njfuzzy]

Conclusive proof that MS Engineers code in HEX.

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
Mr. Jelly! Mr. Jelly! Error at Address Number 6, Treacle Mine Road.
Melon melon melon
+++Wahhhhhhh! Mine!+++
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++

Re:Bad summery

[Zebra_X]

Lol the TFA is FUD. Read the HOTFIX notes which explains that the issue is with Windows OLE (NOT part of the kernel) and files that utilize extended attributes. Note that the crappy AV product adds extended attributes to all of your files (which i'm sure speeds up every file operation on your PC), thus with a kapersky infected computer - you are assured to have the problem. With "normal" files it's unlikely you will have this issue. Media files and the new office files are more likely to pose a problem than your standard files.

The article does not state clearly wether physical memory is a constraint.

Re:Bad summery

[mysticgoat]

So the problem is not in the kernel? It's because the OLE chrome doesn't work right with the extended attributes chrome?

And even so, Microsoft can't fix it in SP1?

This news is both strange and disturbing.

Re:Bad summery

[Sxooter]

Read this about Kapersky:

http://www.uninformed.org/?v=all&a=21

Re:Bad summery

[Shados]

Fortunately, it is not a show-stopper in that case, since my desktop has several millions files and last time I copied the entire thing to backup it didn't so much as hiccup (On Vista). Maybe it is triggerable by some software, but i guess I dont have any of em (and I have hundreds of gigs of various software and crap, since I tend to try every dev tools, servers, etc I can get my hands on).

Man, looking at my poster history it looks like Im such a huge pro-Vista bozo or something... Vista definately has its flaws...but man do Slashdot articles go far for them sometimes.

Re:Bad summery

[Dunbal]

And it has "anthill inside"...

Re:Bad summery

[andersen_hc]

>> Apparently the submitter skimmed the article, and decided to post up a Vista bash on Slashdot.

Erm, did you miss the part of the article after that, which states that the problem occurred _with_ and _without_ Kapersky, but in cases with Kapersky, it was simply more exacerbated.

Re:Bad summery

[shutdown -p now]

Note that the crappy AV product adds extended attributes to all of your files (which i'm sure speeds up every file operation on your PC), thus with a kapersky infected computer - you are assured to have the problem.

I don't see a problem with KAV here. Surely extended attributes - one of the often mentioned features of NTFS - are meant to be used for file metadata, instead of inconsistent 3rd-party approaches (such as separate databases)? And if so, why KAV shouldn't use it to, for example, save date of last scan? It's a documented OS and FS feature used as intended; if it's broken, don't blame KAV for using it, blame Microsoft for not implementing it properly. Then again, it does work fine in XP, so it's more like they broke it in Vista.

Re:Bad summery

[Simulant]

Vista, out of the box, has other issues with copying files besides this one. Just Google "Vista slow file copy".
Whether you experience these problems or not depends highly on your configuration and how and where you are copying files.
I had to disable several Vista 'features' in order to reliably & quickly copy files over my network using Vista.

It boggles my mind that there can be so many issues with such a basic OS function.

Re:Bad summery

[Zebra_X]

Yeah, I'm not excusing MS here - this seems like a trivial item to sort out. Chances are there are not a ton of customers asking for it and they are just trying to keep complexity down in SP1. But still...

Re:Bad summery

[Zebra_X]

KAV should not alter the files on the system on which it resides. Does it remove the crap that it puts on the files after you uninstall it? Probably not, and then you are left with a bunch of files that are larger than needed and have useless information attached to them.

In general I dislike AV software because it's so invasive. This is just another example in the way that your system can get hosed by installing the crap.

KAV should maintain it's own source of information about system state independent of any hooks available in the file system. I mean, what's stopping a malicious user from changing the data in the file attributes and messing with KAV, or using that information to defeat the AV software? KAV is a guard for the system, it's probably best to hold the guards knowledge in secret instead of sprinkling it for all to see.

Not Just Vista

[cmacb]

I don't think there has ever been a version of Windows that could deal with large numbers of files. Particularly if you are using the GUI interface. The whole thing is a toy operating system, really.

A few years ago, while investigating a similar problem with a production server (a SERVER not a client machine) the machine would gradually grind to a halt doing the copy, while still responding (but slowly) to other operations.

I found that the "copy" command did much better than a drag and drop operation, but still would have a problem eventually. Finally, I found that this was a known problem, and that to solve it, a dedicated MS employee had written a utility called "robocopy" the "robo" not being for "robot", but for "robust" (really, it said that!).

Using that usually got the job done, much more slowly than it should have, but at least I didn't have to re-boot the machine daily to clear things up.

Now that Gates is too busy with other things to take tours of the data center, really, Microsoft should do itself a favor and ditch the VMS underpinnings of Windows (some of which they have probably forgotten how to maintain) and build your nice GUI on top of BSD or something similar. That way you won't break your budget (in manpower and electricity) trying to match the Google server farms.

Once that's done you will have the experience needed to do the same on the desktop. You will be doing the world, and yourselves a favor. Thanks in advance!

Re:Not Just Vista

[cmacb]

Well Sigh. I have more anecdotes. I thought that one most meaningful because it wasn't Vista (making my point) and it wasn't a desktop system, making the point that it wasn't a case of an underpowered machine. This was a high end maxed out machine in every respect.

That is what made its inability to accomplish a simple (though large) copy operation so surprising.

Re:Not Just Vista

[Jaxoreth]

Microsoft should do itself a favor and ditch the VMS underpinnings of Windows (some of which they have probably forgotten how to maintain) and build your nice GUI on top of BSD or something similar.

Are you honestly suggesting grafting a proprietary GUI on top of BSD and selling that as a commercial operating system? That would never work.

Re:Not Just Vista

[cmacb]

hehe

Re:Not Just Vista

[the narf]

As a former user of VMS in various incarnations for many years, I can say quite confidently that it would happily copy 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 files, even files with funky ACLs and data formats, without error and without ever running out of memory. Now, while NT and successors re-implemented many of the same IDEAS as VMS, it's not the exact same code.

VMS was, is, and will likely always be, one of the most bullet-proof general-purpose OSes in existence.

Unfortunately, there is no way the same thing can be said of anything with the name "Microsoft Windows" on it.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you shopping? Most computer manufacturers still offer Windows XP instead of Vista as an option on their computers.

and you will be baked (nt)

[erlehmann]

Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)

Re:Just wondering...

[GuyverDH]

I believe the poster is referring to working within 1 cab file, not for all cab files...

It's either none or all it seems.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[LokiSnake]

You know you can opt for a Macintosh. With Leopard coming out and all. Plus, if you *need* Windows, it is just a reboot away or something.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[roman_mir]

and then you take the 640, divide by 2, get 320, remove the last 0, and get 32, the reverse of 23.

Then you multiply 23 by 30, get 690, take 42, reverse it to 24 and subtruct this from 690. You get 666.

What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[blindd0t]

I wonder if it actually craps out after 16535 files...

Ran into this last night

[fishyfool]

I was raring a file up to email and I got the out of memory error. Vista blows.

I get it

[Chris whatever]

I know,,, they want to start doing it like vista is a printer, you can transfer a fixed amount of files then you have to pay more and more and forever more.

that's not a glitch they want to fix, it's a lawsuit they want to prevent :)

For those that aren't getting the joke...

[n dot l]

The original rant may be found here.

Re:For those that aren't getting the joke...

[mooreti1]

Ah. Thanks, ndot. Knowing the context in which the post was...er, posted, helps.

Is it real, or is it a bad error message?

[spaceyhackerlady]

I wonder if the out of memory is for real. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was out of some other resource, but couldn't come up with anything more meaningful to say - like an infamous version of Microsoft Word many moons ago that said it was out of memory when you didn't have a default printer defined in Windows.

What is this XP you speak of? Is it some sort of DOS shell?

...laura

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[rs79]

"How the F%$^ can this be a problem?"

To ensure backward comparabillity. I'm a techno luddite. I got my first DVD drive this year and was slow to get CD drives. All my systems have floppy drives.

98 can be made to puke copying a big file from a floppy. If the floppy is bad you may as well reboot. Delete a few gigs from a hard drive and it goes awy for ages and will more often then not kill the gui task. This is very repeatable. Again, if the CD is bad, reboot.

I can make XP croak as well copying huge files from a CD or floppy which is handles very very badly (see 98). And my biggest drive is 20G (albeit a damn fast one). It seems to do ok copying big files from hard disk to hard disk but even with SCSI RAID with huge caches and the correct drivers you can't expect much left of your CPU when its doing this. Do two at once and you may as well go rebuild your transmission while you're waiting. Apparantly DMA and interrupts are unknown concepts at Redmond; PDP-11's did this just fine (unless you turned off DMA and interrupts in which case it was no faster than a 4Mhz Z-80 CP/M system)

There's really no excuse for this. In the days of 8 bit microprocessor systems we still went out and got the biggest pre-production drives we could to see if they'd copy ok. They may have filled a room but the Navy did indeed have 100 megs online pumping its data through an 8085. Eventually. We knew it'd work cause we tried it. This was 1981.

This is why they use real (IBM, SUN) computers to serve up say, the root or com zone. The root zone isn't big but the com zone is. Copying it isn't a problem on any unix system I've tried, just don't try to load it into BIND on anything but a massive computer or it'll just hang. And not gracefully either.

Windows is for games and sometimes works well enough to run some office tools. As long as you don't need accuracy.

Big files or LOTS of small files are a problem for computers. This isn't news folks. It's just sloppy carelessness.

This was one reason I UPGRADED to XP

[The Relentless]

Plus many more....

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?

You've got too much time on your hands?

Re:OLE mem leak; only affects 'extended attrib' fi

[minerat]

The reason this shows up most with kaspersky is because it adds an alternate data stream to every file and you're then copying thousands of files with ADSs which exacerbates the bug.

That makes me worry even more

[Moraelin]

That actually makes me worry even more.

Now I'm not working at MS, so no way to _know_ it, but I don't think they'd move file copying into the _kernel_. (Then again, they did move stuff to kernel space before to gain 1% more speed, so it's not outright impossible.) But seriously, the kernel in any OS is there to provide the essential stuff, not file copying. You might get file open, file read, file write, and file close in there, but not the graphical shell's implementation of reading from one and writing in the others.

Additionally, _if_ they had file copy implemented in the kernel, then there would be no way for Kaspersky to get in the way there and make it any worse. So they probably don't have a kernel function that copies files.

What I'm getting to with this big tangent is: probably some other kernel function is leaking, and it's probably called from other programs too. I.e., you might get some side-effects even if you _don't_ copy sixteen thousand files in one go. If it's a memory leak in the file-related functions, any other program opening and closing files lots would have the exact same effects... eventually. Even if it doesn't fully run out of memory, well, wth, I have better uses for my RAM than to have 100 MB wasted to such leaks.

E.g., if I brute-force search for some text in all files on my hard drive (I do exactly that now and then), even with some other program (e.g., I use Total Commander lots), how do I know it doesn't happen to use the same functions?

Plus, what interests me more is this: well, copying 16k files in a burst is a good way to cause a leak to run out of RAM. But what happens if you just leave your computer on long enough and copy lots of small files in smaller batches? I mean, wth, nowadays a lot of people leave their computers on. It isn't just for linux uptime brag-fests any more. Does the same effect happen if I leave my computer on for a month and copy, say, 600 files a day?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[gt_mattex]

From TFA - "...it's a kernel leak that lies at the root of problem."

Re:Refresh of an oldie...-Take a clue...

[Fox_1]

It's an old troll, just updated for Vista, gods people.
This thing is almost ten years old.

Re:Just wondering...

[jombeewoof]

...why would anyone want to copy 16400+ files? What if a person were to upgrade their hard drive.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[gmack]

Not quite forced down your throat. Dell will install XP if you ask and HP has some models with XP.

I've had to direct customers to these since Vista's shorter battery life is a huge problem.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[tomstdenis]

mod parent as stupid.

Likely, they're allocating memory to store file attributes or some such that are not being free'd when done with. Hence running out of memory. If you had coded a day in your life you'd see that.

Tom

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

What pisses me off is that I need to buy a new laptop, Vista is now forced down my throat, and I have no option to get XP pre-installed.
dell have some laptops with XP, you just have to go through the small buisness section of thier site to find them.

you also have the option of buying vista buisness or ultimate and excercising your downgrade rights (though you are on your own regarding drivers if you choose this route).

Re:Just wondering...

[kevmatic]

Not that the old style confirmation was any good. XP has no 'no to all' or 'rename,' so if you don't want your data overwritten, you have to stop the operation.

And "Yes to all" doesn't seem to mean that. It only means "Yes to all to this particular question in this directory."

I just used Explorer to try to move an 8gig drive to a folder in another. It took a couple dozen tries.

Re:Just wondering...

[surajbarkale]

Try holding Shift key while clicking. It works as "No to all" for file replace dialog which pops up while copying files. It might do the trick.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Jarjarthejedi]

Umm...no offense, but this isn't exactly a problem the average user is going to encounter. Sure, it's dumb. Sure, there's no good reason for this to be happening. But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier? I think I may have copied 200 files once, and I copied about 15 gigs of data once, but I've never even come close to this limit.

No reason to get all rabid about it, it's a problem that few people are ever going to even come close to seeing.

As for XP pre-installed take a look at Dell, they're offering a lot of laptops (very good ones too) with XP instead of Vista.

Re:What about those of us who need high performanc

[gstoddart]

I want an OS that lets me re-organize my pr0n anytime I want. I *need* to be able to select 50K-100K files at a time and move them from place to place without slowdowns. Ever try, in Windows, to search your network for all the *.jpg files, select a few hundred thousand of them in the search window, and drag them to the new firewire disk you just plugged in?

Dude, you are friggin' hardcore if on a recurring basis you're copying around 50K-100K images of pr0n.

That's almost unfathomable. :-P

Reminds me of something an old prof used to say about stacks of floppies full of porn that used to get traded around ... "beware of geeks bearing gifs".

Cheers

Oh quit whining

[downix]

This is a minor problem, absolutely rare event, occurs with next to no regu...

**OUT OF MEMORY ERROR, SYSTEM HALT**

Re:Just wondering...

[RobertM1968]

Quote>I don't think your average user would do this.

I have learned that copying files using the UI in Vista is a very painful thing to do - even if you don't have 16K+ files.

You've kind of hit on exactly why the average user would do this... backing up data, moving their music collection to another drive or device or computer, etc... the list of possible reasons an average user (who wouldn't select something like RoboCopy or Total Commander or whatever) WOULD choose to use Windows Exploder to do this.

(I think) you are confusing your (correct) knowledge of using the right job for the right task - with an average user's "knowledge" of "Explorer is the only tool I know that does this task"

Very similar to way too many "average users" who click on the "Internet" button/icon on their Windows machine. We all know (well most of us here do) that IE is NOT the Internet. MANY "average users" dont realize there are other/better tools than Explorer to use for mass file transfer.

Regardless, it's not like Explorer is doing (or rather, SHOULD be doing) any massive, unseen mumbo-jumbo that should cause such problems (slow downs or memory leaks when copying)... but simply, that just isnt the case. Even if there are better tools (which I think we all are in agreement there are), the average user (rightly) has the expectation that copying a file is simply that... copying a file. It just isn't... so the average user is wrong, due to poor design (the thumbnailing routines and routines that handle music/video metadata, etc) and bugs just being patched (the OLE component), and who knows what else that will pop up later.

Now, in MS's defense, copying through the UI (especially if it is handling the background tasks it should be - like verifying/fixing shortcuts, thumbnailing, etc) will have some more overhead then similar "Just copy/move the files" programs... that's to be expected. The only problem is MS hasnt fixed the routines that SHOULD BE handling those transparent, background tasks either.

Not quite.

[mattgreen]

Except that Kaspersky most certainly does install itself into the kernel. After all, that is where those types of drivers need to be: living in a ring 0 world to truly protect the computer from malware, which is hopefully confined to ring 3. Also, the symptoms reported don't necessarily have to be kernel leaks. UI components not drawing correctly can occur if GDI resources are leaked for a long enough time, since there is only a finite amount of them available, even when you have 4GB of RAM installed. One application can't take all of them, but a leak in one along with several others taking some would make the symptoms occur.

The real problem is the handling of alternate data streams in a component used by Explorer. Read the KB article. Kaspersky stores information about each file in an alternate data stream, so it is little surprise that it exacerbates the problem. Alternate data streams are a highly dubious feature; I wouldn't be surprised if they become deprecated next Windows release. The idea of maintaining a parallel, but hidden filesystem is pretty bizarre, but more importantly, ripe for abuse by malware. Then again, this may be how MS implements file revision history in 2003 and Vista.

I can't say I'm surprised, really. Vista was rushed out the door and not ready for prime time. Unintended consequences of interactions like this were bound to occur. Maybe that is why I dislike running resident AV software on my machine. Stay out of my kernel, y'know?

Re:Not quite.

[curious.corn]

Alternate data streams are not hidden, they just doesn't show up in the explorer window, otherwise it's just as legitimate as a hidden index file in the directory. Just because it doesn't frequently occur in the programming tutorials doesn't make it deprecated. Actually I hate .DS_store and equivalent MS rubbish metadata stores or .whatever files in $HOME. It's there, it makes sense using it, why the hell throwing it away?

Re:Not quite.

[mattgreen]

No, they aren't hidden per se, but the fact you can't enumerate them using built-in tools makes them semi-dubious in my eyes.

I dislike the use of .DS_store and stuff like thumbs.db or whatever, but at least they seem a little more transparent since they show up under conventional directory listings. If explorer or dir listed ADS's, I'd be more okay with them.

Funny true story

[jollyreaper]

Coworker calls me up a few weeks back. She has a three year old Dell and wanted to "update" it so went to Best Buy and came back with a "memory stickboard" and a steaming fresh pile of Vista Home edition. After getting her to explain what she was wanting to do, I told her to just leave everything sit and bring her computer and original software to work. I figured she just needed to have a virus/spyware cleaning done and maybe have a few things pointed out to her. I told her to make sure that the Vista remained unopened so she could return it and not touch the RAM, either. Odds were she probably didn't even have the right type for her computer. I also told her to make sure her precocious 12-year old knew to not touch anything.

So, what happens? She goes to bed and he goes to town. He installs the RAM, does a full install of Vista and wipes all her shit off the computer, and installs Vista on his laptop for good measure. Oy. She finally brought the machine in today. I was very surprised that Vista was clickable. You could navigate about in it without lag. I think that might in part be due to not having half the required drivers so we don't have sound, network, modem, etc.

I think she said she paid like $200 for that copy of Vista. She could have returned it if the little shit had just fucking listened to what he was told. I told her it would be funny to tell him that's his Christmas. Bet the little shit will listen the next time.

Re:Funny true story

[Auraiken]

Thank god you can flush the little shits.

It's the BIG SHITS you gotta watch out for!

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Shakrai]

I can make XP croak as well copying huge files from a CD or floppy which is handles very very badly (see 98). And my biggest drive is 20G (albeit a damn fast one). It seems to do ok copying big files from hard disk to hard disk but even with SCSI RAID with huge caches and the correct drivers you can't expect much left of your CPU when its doing this. Do two at once and you may as well go rebuild your transmission while you're waiting. Apparantly DMA and interrupts are unknown concepts at Redmond; PDP-11's did this just fine (unless you turned off DMA and interrupts in which case it was no faster than a 4Mhz Z-80 CP/M system)

Actually, a lot of the problems I've noticed with XP is related to the stupid fucking way that Windows handles it's file cache. It will literally swap out PROGRAMS YOU ARE ACTIVELY USING to expand the file cache during a large copy/read operation.

Anybody that has ever tried to alt-tab while copying huge files knows about this.... then you sit and wait for the pages to be swapped back into memory. And you might as well get some coffee, cuz with the hard drive already being pegged for the copy operation, it's gonna take awhile. Oh, and once it's finally done and you need to alt-tab back to the original program.... well, hope you need more coffee.

Lately I've been playing with a program called CachemanXP. Google it. It seems to give you more control over the memory and process management functions of Windows. It also lets you do a 'kill -9' equiv, which (as far as I'm aware) even Task Manager won't do, as it insists on trying to do a graceful shutdown first.

All that development, money, etc...

[CFBMoo1]

And they can't get an operating system out the door that copies files properly? I'm saying this not as someone seeking a flame war or anything but someone who shelled out the $$$ for a copy of Home Premium. I also say this as someone who when copying my entire documents directory to an external drive may have experienced this bug because I had to restart the system to unfreeze stuff at the time.

Hey MS, less features and more SOLID OS please or the penguin will really be biting away at you more then it is now.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[ChrisA90278]

"...Vista is now forced down my throat..."

What about Apple's Mac OS X or Linux? Both are better. No one is forcing you to buy Vista. Buy it only if you like it and think it is worth the money. If you don't like it or can't aford it look at the other OSes.

Updating XP SP3 (Vista stuff)???

[3seas]

Last week my work station had some sort of update happening (later determined to be both a Windows XP and semantics..)that was supposed to happen at 3am not 4:30pm

I left work around 6:30 realizing my drive 6+ gigs space was vanishing..

Next day I had a warning of low disk space of 135megs

After much digging I was able to determine that some of the 11.5+ gigs of drive space I should have was the offline cache that I was able to remove using disk clean and turning off the cache.

But the other 6+ gigs took longer to figure out.

looking at log files and the results of a current drive defrag analysis as I did a defrag the day before this all happened...Apparently after the updates happened my work station decided to offline cache my local drive and in the process stopped doing so when it hit the 135meg low drive trigger. In addition to this it made this part of the offline cache unavailable. In other words it was doing nothing but taking up drive space.

Searching for a solution, as I know where the files were but unsure of how to remove them safely...

In the offline files option you hold down ctrl+shift and mouse click on "delete" and this effectively reinitializes the cache. Reboot required (duh)

after rebooting I turn off cache after setting it to 0 size (as MS might decide to change it next update..... regardless of my now having set updates to notify ONLY....

So where do I send the bill to MS for the company time I spent on this mess?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[davidsyes]

"What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?"

That SOMEbody's croakin' too much smack... (A Spoonerism)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[MiKM]

Forced down your throat?

• Buy a copy of XP (and tell the company you bought your laptop from you disagreed to the EULA - you can get a refund)
• Use an alternative OS (whether it be Linux or OSX or whatever)
• Buy a laptop that has XP preinstalled (yes, companies still sell them)

More Vista FUD

[PeterChenoweth]

Just one average Joe user's opinion...

My notebook is running Vista Home Premium. Core2Duo, 1GB ram, blah blah blah. One of my hobbies is photography, and I have about 18,000 digital photos that I've taken over the years. I keep this collection on a couple of different computers for safety reasons. I also keep them backed up on an external USB drive, and use that drive as a transport mechanism between the other computers (I'm too cheap for a gigabit LAN). When I bought the notebook a few weeks ago, I had no problem copying all of those photos from the external drive to the notebook. While I have not spot checked every single photo, the byte counts match and it certainly appears that they are all there.

While it is unpopular around here to say so, Vista seems to work pretty well for me. YM, of course, MV.

Re:More Vista FUD

[stewbacca]

Actually, I think it is just the isolated anecdotal evidence that goes against the well documented shortcomings of Vista that are not popular ;-)

Re:More Vista FUD

[Terrasque]

From the summary : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us

Cut / paste:

SYMPTOMS
When you try to copy files from a Windows Vista-based computer to another computer by using Windows Explorer, you may receive the following error message:
Out of memory
There is not enough memory to complete this operation.
This problem occurs if the following conditions are true:
        The files include extended attributes.
        You copy lots of files in a single operation.

CAUSE
This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files. So Microsoft have gone so completey loopey as to start FUD'ing their own operating systems?

When will people learn to buy the cable?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"It appears that, incredibly, Vista can run out of memory while copying files."

That's not really the incredible part. What is incredible is that Vista can copy any files at all without buying a special cable! This is what you get when you hack Vista and just start copying files left and right without buying the cable. If you buy the cable, it doesn't run out of memory until after 16,500 files!

Re:When will people learn to buy the cable?

[Oriumpor]

The sad thing is the reviews on Pricegrabber all read like a merchandising catalog description of the product.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have found the first slashdot user that has no porn.

XP had something similar

[Tweekster]

I noticed that when you would copy large amounts of files everything would be swapped out to do so. Including the explorer menu. It was rather pathetic to have to wait to get things out of swap for something as trivial as hitting the start button.

Blame antivirus not Vista for slowdowns

[surajbarkale]

Antivirus softwares need to scan each bit passing to the disk which slows up file copy on any Windows system. Before XP culprit was the default of disabled DMA for HDD. Yes linux does it a bit faster but it's not a huge difference in practice.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[someone1234]

There is a similar bug in all unix, probably linux too.
If there are 16k files in a simple directory, type rm *.
If it works, try the same with 32k files.
Then 64k files. Eventually it will fail :)

Re:Just wondering...

[nomessages]

Make an image of it?

DRM

[Skiron]

It is 16384, but the missing bytes (1784) is the hidden DRM count you are not allowed to see or measure. They even fscked that up (using Excel, I suspect) - it should have been 1984 Orwellian bytes.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Yetihehe]

Well, I did. And there was no problems. Sure, I had to wait long before windows indexed all files, but there was no problems.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[CastrTroy]

While we're on the subject of copying files, did they fix the situation as to what happens when you try to delete,move,copy multiple files, and encounter an error? It seems like the best thing to do would ask the user if they want top stop, or ignore the error and continue copying the rest of the files. As a bonus it would be nice if they displayed a list of which files they couldn't copy, and the reason for each, once the operation is completed. Instead, it just reports that it had an error with a certian file. Doesn't tell you which files it copied, and which it didn't, and doesn't give you any option to continue with the rest of the files. Basically, if you want to clear out your temp files, then it's almost impossible. You keep on encountering files that are in use, and you have to pretty much delete them one-by-one.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[RazzleDazzle]

Win95, Win98, and WinME all can't handle more than 512MB of RAM anyways

SYMPTOMS
If a computer that is running any of the versions of Windows that are listed above contains more than 512 megabytes (for example, 768 megabytes) of physical memory (RAM), you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

You may be unable to open an MS-DOS session (or command prompt) while Windows is running.
The computer may stop responding (hang) while Windows is starting, or halt and display the following error message:

Here is one of their suggested workarounds:

Reduce the amount of memory that is installed in your computer to 512 MB or less.

Here is their support article on it http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q253912&ID=KB;EN-US;Q253912

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[tinkerghost]

Umm...no offense, but this isn't exactly a problem the average user is going to encounter.

That sort of depends if you are talking average home user or average work user. The average home user may actually have this kind of problem - since downloads to the tmp directory are then copied to the correct folder once downloads are complete. Update EQII, WOW & FFXI & you've gone a long ways towards 16K files. Add in patch Tuesday, and your average user is probably going to hit real close to 16K files if they try to keep the PC up for a month.

I probably come reasonably close to 16K files copied in a week on my work PC, so a crash like that would hit me every other week or so - not something I would consider 'Enterprise Ready'.

MS has a habit of programming for the home environment & pushing it into the Business environment.

Yeah, right

[Coop]

User (looking entirely like an idiot):
    "An OS that can't copy files? Yeah right! Whattay think I am, some kind of idiot?"

Re:OLE mem leak; only affects 'extended attrib' fi

[davidsyes]

Does HAVE to be limited to "extended attrib" files?

I wonder if users of say, AutoCAD, are affected. Anyone using HUGE files and using XREFS to link to hundreds of drawings with thousands and thousands of objects (maybe hundreds and hundreds of thousands in a single drawing) might stop and wonder what parts of the drawing might not be showing up. I wonder if AutoDesk will generate a checksum tool (if there isn't one) to daily allay fears users may have.

When I copy and paste in some drawings, TENS of thousands of objects get copied or moved, sucking up a huge chunk of the 512 MB my machine has, and it bogs it down.

Probably other apps like backup applications theoretically could have a problem, no?

No, no, use recursive functions!

[wsanders]

Based on the very funny article at

http://www.meangene.com/essays/microsoft_interview.html

it's probably:

CopyAllFiles(HideouslyLongListOfFiles) {
        [ pop file name off HideouslyLongListOfFiles and copy it ]
        [ call CopyAllFiles(HideouslyLongListOfFiles) ]
}

Which of course leaves the door open for

CopyAFile (ListOfAllBytesInTheFile) {
        [ pop a byte off ListOfAllBytesInTheFile and copy it ]
        [ CopyAFile (ListOfAllBytesInTheFile) ]
}

[Might as well /. this site once and for all, it was the subject of a previous article today!]

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Jesterboy]

Isn't it a little odd that if you strip off the first and last digits of the number "16,400", it's 640, as in 'no one needs more than 640k"? Wow! What are the odds... like one in a million. Actually, it's more like 90 / 90000, but you're only a few orders of magnitude off.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[letxa2000]

But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier?

I haven't checked exactly how many files I have lately, but when I do a backup, I just backup my develop/ and personal/ directories by selecting the two directories and copying them to my USB backup drive. It might not be an elegant way to do my backups, but I assumed it was working. I guess I better go back and see if the same number of files exist in the source/destination directories since not even the copy function of Vista can apparently be trusted.

Maybe I should just start using WinSCP to copy the two directories from my Vista machine to back them up to my Linux server.

Poor rootkit writers

[Qfour20]

If moving files with ADS in them causes problems on wista, what on earth will the rootkit writers do?

-q

Linux was able to copy 65535 files before it ...

[Skapare]

... proceeded to copy the rest of them in my batch over over 27 million files I copied once. I don't do that very often. But hey, I had to fill up my new 500 GB disk somehow :-)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[bladesjester]

I don't know about vista, but the answer in XP is "no".

It just stops the copy, move or delete after telling you that it couldn't do that.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Anonymous Coward]

their bug is legitimate. Unix does shell globbing (yes, it IS fucking retarded), which means that wildcard expansion is done by the shell, and there's a definite file line limit. This can easily be solved using an xargs (or find or something) command, and most shell geeks know how to/that they have to do this, and I don't think any of the GUIs have a problem similar to this.

It's like Grandma used to say...

[hullabalucination]

"An idle Excel spreadsheet is the Devil's workshop."

Are you kidding?

[Belial6]

I've got 10,000 files just in my photos directory. If I want to move them to another computer, I am 2/3 of the way to loosing my family photos. I'm sure that there are lots of people with more pictures than me.

I'm surprised

[Hsien-Ko]

...that it didn't even lock the files away from the user's own will without any way to access it.. That happened on a XP Home Compaq OEM computer once when I copied around 2000 files to a folder, like some anti-piracy countermeasure.

The fix (you can do this at home)

[Skapare]

1. Reboot.
2. Unplug the internet.
3. Reboot.
4. Turn off virus checking.
5. Reboot.
6. Copy all the files.
7. Reboot.
8. Turn on virus checking.
9. Reboot.
10. Run virus scan on copied files.
11. Reboot
12. Plug in the internet.
13. Reboot

Re:The fix (you can do this at home)

[Bluesman]

Unplug the internet? Who are you, UUNET?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[prockcore]

I've seen that bug too.. with rm and grep. It's caused by shell expansion.. "too many files".

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[OrangeTide]

the only thing those numbers have in common is that they are numbers. Any other mystical properties you try to ascribe to these two numbers is entirely an invention in your head.

Beyond Compare

[Dr_Barnowl]

Principally a programmers differencing tool, but also great for file copies, website deployment over FTP, all sorts of things.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[nomadic]

Actually, it's more like 90 / 90000, but you're only a few orders of magnitude off.

Not necessarily his fault, maybe he used Excel to calculate it...

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

I suppose the OP actually meant 16384... which IS more relevant than the both numbers above! :-)

Um...

[Greyfox]

They could just be retarded, did you think of that possibility? Occam's razor and all... They're not Evil. They're just incompetent.

I'm not ruling out the possibility that they might be Evil, mind you. There's ample evidence for that as well. It's just that I've seen their API designs and the product of their OS design and I'd have trouble believing that they could be checking what you're doing on your computer without being caught at it. Hell I'd have trouble believing they're capable of consistently putting their underwear on UNDER their pants! (Oh, I'm SO not going to get a job offer there NOW!)

Re:Um...

[mlwmohawk]

They could just be retarded, did you think of that possibility? Occam's razor and all... They're not Evil. They're just incompetent.

I'm not ruling out the possibility that they might be Evil, mind you. There's ample evidence for that as well. It's just that I've seen their API designs and the product of their OS design and I'd have trouble believing that they could be checking what you're doing on your computer without being caught at it. Hell I'd have trouble believing they're capable of consistently putting their underwear on UNDER their pants! (Oh, I'm SO not going to get a job offer there NOW!)

I don't think it is a case of "either" "or," but is in fact both. Not only are they evil, they are also incompetent. We know that Vista does in fact do "rights management" during copies to and from hard disks. This is a fact that has been published and I consider that evil. They are also incompetent because they can't even do that right.

I like all the new DRM features.

[kwabbles]

I'd choose Vista over faster, cheaper and more stable systems because it helps fight piracy. :)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"How the F%$^ can this be a problem? A file copy is a simple operation. "

The file copy isn't what's broken. Windows generates a list of all the files that need copying and it goes one by one and copies them. If that list grows out of bounds (easy enough to do as storage has been growing at a rapid rate), it'll crash.

I agree with you that there's no excuse for it and that Vista should never have been released with that problem. But 'infinite' is not a concept that computers understand. There's problems happen, and not just in Redmond.

Sorry

[ledow]

Sorry, but this has always been a problem with Windows. I'm sure if you have top-spec machines you might never see it, I'm sure if you shut down every hour because of the way you use your computer, you might never see it...
  but I've always had this problem with every Windows past 3.1 (I didn't use 3.1 with enough files, so I wouldn't know if it was earlier too).

File copy has ALWAYS taken an extortionately large portion of system resources when you do it in the GUI. Windows 95/98 was terrible and once it had hit the magic mark, it would just churn and not get any further (the estimated time would just go mad). Eventually it would run out of "resources" (which had nothing to do with free memory, but more things like file handles etc.) and start erroring, losing icons, blue-screening, etc. and the only fix was a reboot.

I can reproduce the same problem in XP in a snap - just get a truck-load of files and start copying them WHILE DOING SOMETHING ELSE, e.g. renaming, filing, categorising, or just working in the background. It'll take a while but eventually everything will slow to a crawl (and, yes, I've done this many a time on systems without any form of file read interception like antivirus etc.). It tends not to crash quite so bad but it will swap like mad and slow everything to a crawl.

And again, doing it via command-line copy won't reproduce it anywhere near as easily. A few years ago I was categorising and filing approximately 50Gb of VB programs, website source, emulator roms, millions of tiny files etc. and it was a pain to do precisely because of this. I reverted to a command-line about halfway through which sped things up a lot.

It's DEFINITELY more to do with the NUMBER of files, though, and not the individual size. A million tiny files copies a lot slower than one massive one of the same size. I've always just put it down to "something" in the copy GUI routinges not releasing file handles of already copied files in time to read in new ones.

And, sorry, but this is something that I've never been able to reproduce in KDE. Even so, on both OS, I hate the fact that the copy GUI takes so many resources - often the window can't even redraw itself properly until the copy has finished.

And don't even get me started on "Estimated times" in file dialogs...

Re:Sorry

[failedlogic]

This is very true. When I have to copy a large amount of files in XP, I always use the command line (where practical) because the GUI will slow the system considerably. Command line doesn't.

Is Vista ready for the desktop?

[ProteusQ]

Guess not. Use Kubuntu/Mac/PCBSD instead. They can copy files fine. Cheap too.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Macthorpe]

It's forced down your throat because you couldn't be bothered to source a laptop from anywhere but CC?

Give me a break.

Re:Just wondering...

[808140]

Sure, you could. Hey, you could also write your own copy program! Or, you could boot into Linux and do it from there!

Seriously though, why are we making excuses? Copying files is a pretty basic file system operation, and just because there's some other way to do what you're trying to do doesn't mean that it's ok that the system runs out of memory.

The average user is probably not going to make an image, or boot up into Linux, or write his own copy program. He is going to assume — and rightfully so — that he can back up his hard drive (or whatever) by dragging and dropping in Explorer. When Vista wigs out, and leaves his system in an inconsistent state, he is going to be very upset — again rightfully so — and telling him "You should have followed nomessages' advice and made an image instead" is not going to make him feel any better.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[Tim C]

There is no reasonable explanation for it except that THEY are checking what YOU are doing with YOUR computer.

That explanation is even less reasonable, if only because it should no more run out of memory reporting on your activities than performing the file copy itself.

So you would reuse a buffer for copy files, but not for phoning home, yet claim 25 years as a programmer?

Your bias is burning so bright it's blinding you.

Not really that simple in Vista...

[kwabbles]

It's not a simple operation. Think about how a file copy works within Vista:

1. The file is opened.
2. The file is scanned for viruses.
3. The file is scanned for adware.
4. The file is scanned for DRM violations.
5. The user is asked if they're really sure they want to copy the file.
6. The user is asked again if they're sure they want to copy it.
7. The OS makes a judgement on how long it will take to copy so it can update the pretty stats in the gui.
8. Lots of flashy graphics and widgets are loaded to show you a pretty animation while you wait.
9. The file is copied.
10. The destination file is verified that it is intact.
11. The destination file is scanned for viruses.
12. The destination file is scanned for adware.
13. The destination file is scanned for DRM violations.
14. The file is successfully copied.

Hell - I'm surprised their OS can even handle copying 1,600 files, let alone 16,000.

Re:Not really that simple in Vista...

[Anonymous Coward]

Need to add a couple more steps.

1a The file(s) is scanned for creation date, last access date, file type, etc.
1a.1 If it is a known file type, it scans for metadata
            WMA: bitrate, artist, album, title, etc
            BMP: width, height, bpp, etc
            EXE: Source, Author, Revision Number, compatibility info
1a.2 If it is unknown, barf all over user.
9a Unable to copy, file is in use, delete original file.
14a disable undo. (Has anybody actually gotten undo to work in windows explorer?)
15 Reboot unexpectedly

Re:Not really that simple in Vista...

[rajkiran_g]

How come your post is modded funny and not informative/insightful?

Re:Not really that simple in Vista...

[Oriumpor]

Mod parent insightful.

Christ. The awful bit is it's true.

Re:Not really that simple in Vista...

[kimvette]

It's funny because it's true. . .

New OS same old MS

[stewbacca]

Is this somehow related to the stupid inability of pretty much every Windows version ever to NOT start copying files until it can assure there is enough room on the target disk? I've lost track of how many times something has started copying, gone for a few minutes, then just stopped because 75% of the way in Windows realized there wasn't enough disk space to finish.

Re:New OS same old MS

[pclminion]

Is this somehow related to the stupid inability of pretty much every Windows version ever to NOT start copying files until it can assure there is enough room on the target disk? I've lost track of how many times something has started copying, gone for a few minutes, then just stopped because 75% of the way in Windows realized there wasn't enough disk space to finish.

Such checks are pointless at best. Just because there was enough space when the operation STARTED doesn't mean there will be enough space when it ENDS. You know, other programs might use up disk space in the meantime. And vice-versa -- just because there ISN'T enough space at the beginning doesn't mean that disk space will not become available during the operation.

It's like approaching a traffic light, seeing that it's green, and proceeding to drive through the intersection with your eyes closed. The light couldn't possibly turn red in the meantime, right?

The shell should probably WARN the user that not enough space is CURRENTLY available, but there's absolutely no reason to DISALLOW the operation.

Re:New OS same old MS

[stewbacca]

Pointless? Avoiding 5 minutes of wasted time isn't pointless to me. I'm talking about when you select 3.2gbs of data and want to transfer it to a storage target that only has 3.0gbs of data available. Windows doesn't bother to check. Instead it just starts with the little flying papers bit, then about 5 minutes later, decides to tell you there isn't enough space. Mac OS (or fill in your OS of choice) on the other hand, doesn't waste your time, and tells you there isn't enough space BEFORE it even starts to copy files. Hardly pointless!

Re:New OS same old MS

[pclminion]

Pointless? Avoiding 5 minutes of wasted time isn't pointless to me.

Yes, pointless. Knowing that enough space is available at the time of the check tells you NOTHING. In fact, it gives you a false sense of security, thinking that the operation WILL complete successfully. If some other application suddenly allocates a 2 gigabyte file, you're screwed.

On the other hand, at least getting a WARNING when there is NOT enough space available would be nice. I'm not defending Windows -- far from it. I am simply pointing out that checking for sufficient disk space is absolutely NO GUARANTEE that the copy will complete.

Repeat after me.

[Chas]

I will not use a Microsoft Product until the SP2 comes out.

Waiting for details from Mark Russinovich

[gr8dude]

I hope that soon this story will be covered on his blog. Previously he described other weird things happening during file copy procedures, as well as the Vista network performance issue. Hopefully, his story will provide enough low-level details for the hungry minds.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[680x0]

Where could I get the laptop-specific parts? I've built a number of desktop machines, and know where to get those parts. I've even found RAM and HD for laptops (as those are common upgrades). But the case and display? "motherboard"?

"Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."

[dpbsmith]

"Very few files have data streams, so the vast majority of users won't ever see a problem. Kaspersky choses to pollute every single file with a stream, however, which is why systems with it installed exhibit the problem."

Yeah, that's the typical Windows world attitude.

The operating system is specified to do certain things. It doesn't do them. Well, if not many people use this feature, so what? One of the way we make the feature list long is by including lots of features that don't work, but we figure nobody will use them and nobody will find out...

"Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."

"What kind of soup?"

"The orange scented celery puree.

"Oh, hardly anyone orders that. You should expect flies in it. It's your own fault for being foolish enough to order it."

Re:"Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."

[Mattsson]

If other OS's do it the Microsoft way, it it still the wrong way.

First you implement and fix basic OS functions, like file copy, etc, so that it works correctly.
Then you implement and fix fancy stuff that most people want and use so that it works correctly.
Then you implement and fix fancy a few people want and use so that it works correctly.
Then you go about implementing and and fixing stuff that almost no one use.

Implementing all at once in a way that doesn't work, then fixing fancy stuff most people use, then fixing basic OS functions, then fixing what a few people use, is the wrong way to go about it.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Capt James McCarthy]

"Vista is now forced down my throat"

I got news for you, that is Vista, but it isn't your throat it being forced into.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Darinbob]

What pisses me off is that I need to buy a new laptop, Vista is now forced down my throat, and I have no option to get XP pre-installed.

Dell is selling some. Maybe not a huge selection, but they're there.

Requesting MSFT Hotfixes

[theguru]

Requesting a hotfix from MSFT support is pretty easy these days. Find the KB articles, go to this address, enter your email, the KB number, platform information, and they email you the hotfix.

It's a lot better than the old days where you had to get a support ticket opened, find a human, convince them there was a hotfix, and get them to provide you the bits somehow.

Re: Too much time?

[TaoPhoenix]

Nope, that's a Styx song.

Certain gifted/cursed types can see those numerical interactions instantly, thus wasting no time.

peeve

[stewbacca]

Just a peeve of mine..."and all files are present and accounted for." As a former military man, I have to correct this misused cliche. It is "All present OR accounted for", not both. Something is either present, or if it is not, but it is accounted for. Thanks for letting me rant.

Re:peeve

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

You tell em chewy... uh stewy.

Could it be

[Yurka]

that the error message is lying and it is in fact file descriptors that are leaking? I can imagine people writing the info window saying "we'll never explain to the John Q. User what a file descriptor is, whereas memory is something they have a chance to understand; come to think of it, there's a ready answer for the helpdesk techs whenever somebody calls about this - buy more RAM!"

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

That explanation is even less reasonable, if only because it should no more run out of memory reporting on your activities than performing the file copy itself.

So you would reuse a buffer for copy files, but not for phoning home, yet claim 25 years as a programmer?

There are plenty of reasons why you would use a single buffer for the copy, but a small buffer for each file. Once scenario could be that since a copy is going to be faster than internet, you would queue up file information packets structures to be sent out, the programmer probably just forgot to delete structs. If you wanted stealth, you would do this slowly or when the computer is not being used.

We know as a fact that (1) Windows machines phone home periodically. (2) That Vista performs "rights management" on files copied to and from the hard disk(s). Is my assertion so far off base?

Isn't this an anti-piracy feature of Vista?

[jocknerd]

Once you get past 16,400 mp3's, the RIAA is notified.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Holy69]

http://www.ibuypower.com/ has some great laptops and still allow you to get Windows XP installed.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[stewbacca]

Rebooting into Windows is so 2006...

Small files

[SmallFurryCreature]

Gentoo (a linux distro that compiles from source) has all its packages in a simple directory structure with files for each package. That is a LOT of files. The intresting thing to see is just how much speed up you can get using the various filesystems on offer. Reiserfs really makes a HUGE difference to the speed. Same HD, same kernel, same drivers, just a different filesystem and you can easily get a tenfold increase over other journalled filesystems.

Same with compiling, I know mount /tmp on tmpfs (ram disk) and the speed increase is enormous.

HOWEVER, I now have a ext for boot, jfs for / (no real reason, I just like how it handles itself reiserfs for /usr/portage tmpfs for /tmp and /var/tmp (and I really should choose a new one for / and pick jfs or xfs for my movie collection). Somehow I think that this is just a bit harder to support then NTFS for everything.

Windows has to do LOTS of things and has to do them reasonably, that is actually a lot harder then do a single thing and do it really well. I think the problem here is that windows does more then just copy the file but actually tries to process the file and then doesn't properly release the memory. MS LOVES doing this, it is the MS way, it can't leaves files alone, it must read them so you can see how many minutes a song has, the dimensions of the image or the creator of that movie. This case makes it clear because anti-virus software also LOVES to read files while they are being moved around. That is its job, but it means that this is FAR from the straight copy your old systems did.

MS has always had troubles with file operations, just try to copy a large amount of files, it will takes ages to get ready to even start copying it, way more then is reasonable. Its system just ain't designed for it. Take the undo option, if you think about it, that is a memory hog waiting to happen, does it really have to remember ALL those thousands of file that a single command can generate? Ouch.

Re:Small files

[Wolfrider]

--Boy, have I got good news for you -- JFS beats ReiserfsV3 all hollow. And ZFS is *definitely* worth looking into.

--I used to be a HUGE Reiserfs fan - notail for backups, used it everywhere. Switched to JFS and got a HUGE performance increase. Noatime everywhere, as well.

--Now I use Reiser3 for " / " Root filesystems and Squid (noatime,tail) - and JFS for *everything* else (including Vmware), unless it's ext3 for Windoze / USB-disk sharing. Give it a try -- you'll prolly see a big speed difference with stuff like USB/Firewire drives, for one thing.

===
VI vs Emacs arguments are pointless.
' jstar ' is the best. ;-)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[theRiallatar]

Do yourself a favor. Use Robocopy.

.. But there's no sense crying over every mistake

[hendrix2k]

you just keep on trying till you run out of cake.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[rbanffy]

You can do as I did with my last laptop. I never booted it into Vista (I knew they would refuse to refund me, so I didn't bother to record there is no "I don't agree" button), but, instead, booted from a Ubuntu 7.04 CD and it worked flawlessly. It even got Compiz working in a couple minutes as to wow Windows vict^H^H^H^Husers.

Or you can do as my wife did - she went to an Apple store, bought the most beautiful computer she could afford and now she is very happy with her gorgeous laptop that just works, never locks up and is quite safe against the viruses that inundate our e-mail thanks to how Microsoft both dominates the market and develops their software.

Windows SBS 2003 file copy problem

[labnet]

Reminds of a problem I never solved using ntbackup on windows server 2003.
Because ntbackup uses one large file, and a file copy uses 2k (somtimes 4k) of paged kernel memory per 1Meg when copying a file (In our case another SATA HDD), and Kernel memory seems limited, our backup would always fail at around 50-60GB. The only solution we found was to create multiple smaller backups of around 30GB.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[weenie510]

huge files from a ... floppy

Is that an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence"?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Goaway]

How the F%$^ can this be a problem? A file copy is a simple operation. Spoken like someone who has never had to implement a multiple-file copy in a GUI. There are many non-trivialities involved. (Pop quiz: How do you calculate the remaining time? How do you handle infinitely recursing soft links?)

That's not to say that Microsoft didn't fuck this one up, but it's certainly not as simple an operation as you might think.

Huh?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Why is this newsworthy? Vista has a memory leak in the shell, and they offer a patch on request and will fix it in SP1.

Anyone try using Firefox lately? Sitting here, doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, with 3 tabs open, it's at 69MB right now. I have seen it hit 300MB before, and the longer you have it open, the worse it gets.

Memory leaks happen. They're called bugs. Bugs eventually get fixed.

No, this has nothing to do with a bug in Vista. This has to do with the Slashdot editors throwing more red meat to the dogs. Just like the broadband stories that pop up every few weeks (how many times do we need to be told that the US isn't #1 in broadband?), and just about every other Vista story.

You may notice something though - what hasn't been popping up. There are fewer vulnerabilities for Vista: Secunia reports just 15 vulnerabilities ever, compared with 24 for XP in 2007 and 45 for XP in 2006.

People are complaining that Vista requires too much memory and doesn't have 100% hardware support. Well, 2GB of DDR2 now runs about $60, and pretty much any new hardware sold today is Vista-compatible (not to mention lots of older hardware, including everything in my 3 Vista PCs, all of which predate Vista).

People won't care that Vista has higher hardware requirements. They will care that it's more secure and more robust. Ask anyone who has overclocked their GPU too much:

• XP: Blue sceeen
• Linux: X dies (along with your session), sometimes kernel panic
• Mac OS X: Happy graphical kernel panic
• Vista: Display goes black for a couple of seconds, GPU restarts with default settings, desktop reappears

It may not seem like a big thing, but display drivers are very complex and they shouldn't be able to bring down the computer.

Re:Huh?

[pclminion]

Why is this newsworthy?

Everyone writes bugs. But it takes a certain kind of moron to fuck up a file-copying routine. It takes another kind of idiot to fuck up the QA so the original stupidity is not caught. Seriously, we should all expect and demand better.

Re:Huh?

[Just Some Guy]

People won't care that Vista has higher hardware requirements. They will care that it's more secure and more robust. Ask anyone who has overclocked their GPU too much:

Vista is better because it copes with you intentionally damaging your hardware? Unless DRM really means Dumbass Ricer Modifications, I don't think Vista actually does what you think it does.

Re:Huh?

[jisatsusha]

Vista has a memory leak in the shell, and they offer a patch on request and will fix it in SP1.

From the summary:

Apparently a fix was scheduled for SP1 but didn't make it.

Off topic (How can you expect consistent moderatio

[SmallFurryCreature]

How can you expect consistent moderation? Because of the way the system works, the first mod can effectively hide a post from other modders (yes they advice you to mod at -1 but who does that?) so wether a post gets seen or not depends on who gets to see it first. Mod it down, and it is gone. Mod it up, and more people see it, this includes downward modders but also upward modders, so it totally depends on the first mod.

Then there is the fact that moderation is totally random. So random that sometimes I get them constantly while othertimes I go for weeks without. Meta moderation is even worse.

Then there is mods themselves, not the moderators, but the way you can mod. There is no simple "FALSE" mod. or "you are an idiot" mod. Or a "True" mod. Flamebait and troll are way to often used to mean "I don't agree with you." Insightfull and intresting far too often for someone just stating the facts.

So don't expect sense from the moderation system, just accept that some of the best posts will disappear forever because a mod didn't like it, and that some crap will be modded up.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[gnasher719]

Umm...no offense, but this isn't exactly a problem the average user is going to encounter. Sure, it's dumb. Sure, there's no good reason for this to be happening. But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier? I think I may have copied 200 files once, and I copied about 15 gigs of data once, but I've never even come close to this limit. The "Developer" folder in my MacBook contains about 85,000 files. I would assume that >50% of all Slashdot readers with a Macintosh have installed XCode, so not being able to copy 16,400 files is absolutely inexcusable. And yes, the MacBook handles that without any problems.

Copy Music? Never

[bazald]

Microsoft employees buy another copy of their 13K+ music collections if they want another copy.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[AJWM]

This has to do with shell expansion and the argument list that gets passed to exec(). It's fixed in a recent Linux kernel version, it now allows argument lists limited only by available memory.

Of course there were always ways around it.

Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's just the latest in a long list of poorly-implemented file operations that includes these gems:

1. Shift-drag, which moves directories, but if there's not enough room, it stops halfway through, leaving two half-complete, completely now un-re-mergeable directory half-trees.

2. The famed (File) Explorer bug where Explorer starts doing things such that, once it starts, you can't delete a folder without a reboot because it gives you a "file is in use" error -- along with the highly offensive suggestion to "please close the application in order to delete the file", which you can't do because it's Explorer. Ok, you can kill Explorer and (from the Task Manager window, do Run->explorer, but that's hardly obvious.)

3. The attempts to keep idiot users from deleting files in use prevents people from being able to delete virus files and the like. In the olden days, you could do option-drag the file to the trash and clobber it even if it was open, but MS changed that to "help" the situation.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[SL Baur]

Unix does shell globbing (yes, it IS fucking retarded) Not particularly. It guarantees that it's always available. I thought the VMS design of having globbing done in a library was suboptimal.

The limitation on `*' expansion is command line length (actually command line length plus number of parameters plus the size of the environment) and that is an irritation. More so if the shell doesn't enforce the same limit when invoking a shell function, although perhaps that's a feature.

I don't think any of the GUIs have a problem similar to this. You didn't RTFA. Internet Explorer apparently has a limitation of 2**14 files in a single operation.

There are two bugs involved in this article. One is a limitation of (probably) 16384 total files in one operation and the second is a memory leak in a library when many files with extended attributes are processed.

Magic numbers, whether it is 14 characters for a file name, 3 levels of indirect inode blocks, or whatever are evil. GUI programmers are not immune from that programming mistake.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[cHiphead]

You, sir, have no respect for the ass faces of this world.

Maybe it IS his throat.

Cheers.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Intron]

Or if you convert it to octal and turn it upside-down it spells: OSOOh

Suggestion

[bytesex]

Maybe they're implementing filesystem transactions in memory ? See what happens when you issue three or four copying commands at the same time with a third/fourth that size ?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[feepness]

Actually, it's more like 90 / 90000, but you're only a few orders of magnitude off. Whoosh! Right over your head!

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[hoover]

Shouldn't this be "divide by 8.3" in the true DOS spirit of things? ;-)

Glass Houses, Stones, Etc.

[DCMonkey]

Of course, this kind of thing never happens on a Linux Desktop.

Re:Glass Houses, Stones, Etc.

[geekoid]

Interesting..I wonder is some MS developer got lazy when writing some code and just ripped it from Gnome? ;)
Call me when it's confirmed.

Possible workaround: Use ONE file for everything

[failedlogic]

I expected this very problem to happen and have taken corrective measures. Simply, I use one large file for everything.

Think about the innovation that is being created here. I can access all the spreadsheets I have ever created whilst updating my current webpage project, search for an e-mail archive and read the latest TPS Report Coversheet without changing files. It means I don't have to partition my hard drive. And I only have *one* file ever to backup.

This has simplified my daily work to the point I fired all my IT staff. Thanks Microsoft!

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[amokk]

So you're saying you are too god damn stupid to consider multi-threading file copies?
You may have been coding for 25 years but that doesn't imply that you are any good at it.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

and then you take the 640, divide by 2, get 320, remove the last 0, and get 32, the reverse of 23. Then you multiply 23 by 30, get 690, take
42,
reverse it to 24 and subtruct this from 690. You get 666. What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?

Well, there you have it. The answer to the universe and everything.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[InvalidError]

For those situations...

Run -> "cmd" -> del %dir\*.* /s

It will clear most stuff and you will see error messages fly by... redirect output to a file for later examination if desired.

I use the good old 'del' whenever I know I will be deleting something like 20k files and do not wish to waste time waiting for windows to prepare for that operation... why the heck does Windows need to scan directories to be deleted before deleting them is beyond me, just delete them and be done with it. Same thing for copying, Windows wastes time scanning the source directory for no apparent reason since it won't tell you you have insufficient disk space to complete the operation until the target drive runs out of disk space... or any other errors for that matter, until it runs into them while carrying out the actual operation.

Linux has quirks, so does Windows. Linux has the excuse of being an relatively immature desktop OS but on the Windows side, it can only be written off as the result of half-ass design decisions.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Farakin]

Actually a lot of OEM's are offering downgrades, call CDW (shameless plug)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[blincoln]

But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier?

mp3 collections? I ripped all of my music CDs to mp3 awhile ago and at least came close to that figure. I imagine people who have a bunch of downloaded tracks would have even more.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Yes, but everyone knows one-in-a-million chances come up nine-times out of ten.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Master of Transhuman]

Yup. I've just about given up trying to copy gigabytes of files from large drives to backup drives because of this. I mean, once you've done this ONE TIME, it should be OBVIOUS to ANY designer that it needs to be fixed to allow the copy to continue - or resume - or SOMETHING other than just DYING.

Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file.

Daily while working with clients I ask myself how anybody could use this garbage on a daily basis. When I reboot into Windows on my dual-boot openSuse/XP machine, I always dread it because I KNOW something is not going to work properly, or something extraneous will have to be done BEFORE I can do what I need to do.

Pathetic OS. Just pathetic.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Doctor Faustus]

But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier?
Successfully, never. WinXP's Explorer doesn't work worth a damn for copying any significant number of files, either. The last time I attempted was February, and I ended up using SQL Server to generate a batch file to explicitly copy every file.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Kingrames]

The cake is a LIE.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Andrei D]

and then you take the 640, divide by 2, get 320, remove the last 0, and get 32, the reverse of 23. Then you multiply 23 by 30, get 690, take 42, reverse it to 24 and subtruct this from 690. You get 666. Oh, come on. It's not 666. It's obviously 100000. Try again in Excel 2007 if you don't believe me.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Doctor Faustus]

Pop quiz: How do you calculate the remaining time?
Don't. It's going to be wrong, anyway.

How do you handle infinitely recursing soft links?
Does Windows even support soft links?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[ET_Fleshy]

I use the excellent program Copy Handler for my copying needs. I highly recommend you give it a try!

MOD PARENT UP

[Kingrames]

+1, WHOOSH!

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[MikeBabcock]

You're quite welcome. There's a reason those of us who love *nix command-lines love them -- they're immensely powerful.

Another personal favourite of mine (not that you asked):

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{size} %{name}\n" | sort -g ... lists all installed packages on an RPM based system with the largest ones at the end, for when you're looking to do clean-up. I wrote a quick one-line automatic GPG/PGP key signature fetcher once too (download all signatures for a key to check web of trust).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[TJamieson]

Or try "rmdir /s " to nuke the entire directory and all subdirs.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[sbate]

That does not make a bit of sense, either one of you!

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Master of Transhuman]

Documents. Web pages. Download a Web page and you get a bunch of files. Download a bunch of Web pages and you get an even bigger bunch of files. Do that for a couple years, you'll have thousands of files. Need to rearrange your partitions and you need to copy them.

Bingo! 16,000 files not a problem. And we don't know if this bug hits at what size, anyway.

In my Miscellaneous directory under my Work directory, I currently have over 36,000 files, 33,000 of them in my "Utility Documentation" directory which holds the Web pages and other documents relating to the 1000 of so Windows utilities I have stored on the system.

Saying a bug is not a bug if nobody ever hits it is really not an excuse.

Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Kingrames]

New laptops come with Linux. You just have to manually start the install. The Vista on there is just so you can configure the fingerprint scanner prior to the real OS being installed.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[rs79]

Yes but it can be fixed, or rather, worked around. It's been this way for literally decades.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Lehk228]

i haven't noticed that problem.

then again i don't use a page file.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[rs79]

" That's not to say that Microsoft didn't fuck this one up, but it's certainly not as simple an operation as you might think. "

If the list of files to be copied is small, keep it in ram. If it's big keep it in a file.

Yes it's a performance hit if you keep it in a file, but you're copying a gajillion files you'll not notice.

This aint rocket science.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Nosklo]

why the heck does Windows need to scan directories to be deleted before deleting them is beyond me (...) Same thing for copying, Windows wastes time scanning the source directory for no apparent reason since it won't tell you you have insufficient disk space to complete the operation The scan is to know beforehand the size and number of files before copy/delete operation, so windows can make a <sarcasm>VERY RELIABLE</sarcasm> progress bar, with a <sarcasm>VERY RELIABLE</sarcasm> estimated time that <sarcasm>ALWAYS</sarcasm> measures correctly the time left for the operation to complete.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Gr8Apes]

we could just go - there's 1 reason OSX is better than MS crap: the "Terminal" a real, honest to goodness command shell with actual functionality that allows it to talk to every server class OS out there.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[wizardforce]

I assume that you need certain proprietary programs that can't be run through Linux- if you can't find any laptops with XP on them, there is a way to get XP on them without paying for %@%$ing Vista. You need to find a copy of XP [harder now but not impossible] refuse the Vista Eula, remove Vista [or have it removed] technically you get the license cash from Vista back which you can put toward a copy of XP. though if you could get away with using FOSS/wined software, I'd go with Debian or Ubuntu and tell them to shove VIsta somewhere unpleasant.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[iluvcapra]

Spoken like someone who has never had to implement a multiple-file copy in a GUI. There are many non-trivialities involved.

Even grading them on a curve, OS X is able to do this without too much trouble. I have 6 figures worth of files on my boot drive and I am able to copy it whenever I need to make a copy (yes thru the GUI).

Setting this aside, we read from TFA:

It's only when the user checks the number of files in source and destination that they realize they have a problem.

Have error messages gone out of style, or are the Explorer devs in denial? If the app is running up against a limit or is running out of memory to complete an operation, it should be reporting so, loudly, and providing the user with options.

16,400 files?!

[rholland356]

16,400 files?! Why, that's more files than a person could use in a LIFETIME!

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[FrangoAssado]

[...] consider multi-threading file copies?

Why would you do that? The bottleneck in file copy is I/O, not CPU. A multi-thread file copy will just make more CPUs wait for the hard drive(s).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[dselic]

I noticed this years ago and was extremely surprised that I couldn't find practically any discussion of it on the Web even after hours of Googling. Several people recognized the memory-hungry cache as a problem, but the bottom line was that since it's a kernel design fault, there isn't anything you can do about it.

In my case XP's cache allocation algorithm was a source of incredible frustration. All the movies and music I get off the Net are shared on our home network. Whenever somebody started transferring a couple of hundred MB, my computer would virtually stop responding. Although the situation improved somewhat after a memory upgrade, big transfers still cause slowdowns.

Re:What about those of us who need high performanc

[MikeBabcock]

Use Linux

find /autofs -iname "*.jpg" | cpio -pv /media/SEAGATE/ ... assuming you use autofs to auto-mount visible shares on the network and your firewire drive is mounted as /media/SEAGATE of course, you shouldn't have any problems, besides griding the network to a halt perhaps.

16,400 files copied should be plenty for most user

[bsharma]

Just as 640K of RAM is sufficient.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[scot4875]

Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."

I know what you're saying, but I think you're saying it wrong. You surely don't mean that a developer should use a float or a double precision float as a counter. Maybe an int64, but there's absolutely no way that anyone would ever copy 2^32 files, let alone 2^64.

What they *don't* want to do is say "Oh, I'm just going to declare an array of char* [MAX_FILE_COUNT]" and then not check to see if there are more than MAX_FILE_COUNT files being copied.

There are very good reasons to use simple integers for counters and to set practical limits on things like this. The key is to check and to *enforce* the limits. Obviously something like a counter in a file transfer operation isn't going to need to be very high performance, but using the wrong data types can have a serious performance impact if you don't know what you're doing. Also, I've written code that won't read textures larger than 2^15x2^15. It's an entirely artificial limit, but I don't see a need for 32,768x32,768 textures any time soon. Maybe in 10 years there will be displays and hardware that can actually *use* textures that big, and in that case my code will just say "oops, I can't handle that," notify the user, and exit.

Yes, completely off topic, but I get tired of hearing the "developers should X" line with no perspective.

--Jeremy

On Win2K, Gigabyte size file copy corrupts NTFS

[bsharma]

Yes; I have verified on many machines and gave up on copying very large video files on Wiin2K. Always corrupted NTFS after more than ten 2GB or larger files were copied. Not sure if it happens on XP. Can anyone confirm if you can copy hundreds of multi GB files on XP?

Re:On Win2K, Gigabyte size file copy corrupts NTFS

[justthinkit]

Yes, works fine in DOS and via GUI in XP.

Re:On Win2K, Gigabyte size file copy corrupts NTFS

[udippel]

>> Always corrupted NTFS after more than ten 2GB or larger files were copied.

Yes, works fine in DOS and via GUI in XP

I seriously doubt the former. I doubt that you have even tried to ever copy > 16.000 files, respectively more than 10 files larger than 2 GB in DOS.
I doubt that my DOS 5 or 6 support such drives. But I might be wrong.

Re:On Win2K, Gigabyte size file copy corrupts NTFS

[justthinkit]

You do realize that Windows has a DOS. And this is what I am referring to. XP's DOS box. cmd.exe if you prefer. There is no other DOS in Windows XP -- you can't reboot to an exclusive DOS any more (unless you use a floppy). Hence "DOS and via GUI in XP" is referring to the two main environments within XP -- the most commonly used ones available today. Applicable I would say.

Re:On Win2K, Gigabyte size file copy corrupts NTFS

[udippel]

(It almost doesn't matter any more.)
No, there is no DOS in XP. Over.
What you get is a 'Command Prompt' (this is why it is named likewise, in distinction to 98's MSDOS Prompt) that behaves slightly like a DOS command prompt. Meaning, you are using the XP subsystems for I/O of XP's kernel with an ugly interface.
Try to boot to a DOS floppy, and tell me that you can copy more than 10 files > 2GB, and I'll call you a liar.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Kuciwalker]

Yes, Windows supports soft links.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Brad1138]

What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?

It tells me that you are definitely a /.er. You used 690 in your equation. Completely missing to opportunity to "69"x10.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Just curious, but I wonder if it would work to create a RAM drive to use up all but 512MB. You could even stick the page file in the RAM drive.

Of course, if you're running Win9x in this day and age, and on a machine new enough to have half a gig of RAM, you're either a geek doing it "just to see how it runs" or a masochist looking for new ways to torture yourself.

(Of course, you've now got the geek in me seriously considering trying it out.)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[ScrewMaster]

Have error messages gone out of style, or are the Explorer devs in denial? If the app is running up against a limit or is running out of memory to complete an operation, it should be reporting so, loudly, and providing the user with options.

More likely there was so much pressure on them to ship something that something had to slip.

Copying? So new, need a few years to get it right.

[kneeslasher]

The simple file operations in Windows (and indeed in other OSs) still drive me insane. If I want to move/copy/delete a bunch of files (say several thousand) stored in a deep hierarchy of several folders, I've yet to see a drag-and-drop solution which will handle this (in any OS). Specifically, if a single file fails, the entire operation is aborted, leading to tons of wasted time as one figures out what was/wasn't moved/copied/deleted. I mean it's been decades... why hasn't the technology matured? The closest I've come to a solution which allows pausing/resuming/skipping/bandwidth control/etc. of copy/move operations is a handy little program for Windows called TotalCopy (http://www.ranvik.net/totalcopy/). Why this function (a few KB) isn't built into Windows by now is beyond me.

This latest news about Vista is just confirmation that the issue has been ignored again, and eye-candy that any sane user would instantly disable because of the system hit has been implemented at the expense of system usability: form above function. Here's a little ditty I wrote when Vista previews were coming out. As pertinent now as it was then:

-

-

Bud Light presents ... Real Men Of Genius.

[Real Men Of Genius.]

Today, we salute you, Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.

[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy.]

While others marvel at an operating system whose primary repair
tradition is a complete wipe, you just can't wait for more of the
same.

[I just love my Long Horn!]

Yes, it lacks security, efficiency, speed, heck, just about
everything. But ever since 1985, when you first jammed your floppies
into that curvaceous 186, you've been enraptured with Windows.

[It was five and a quarter inches!]

Despite the fact that it requires an array of Crays to run already
invented technologies at sub-optimum speeds, you will beat the rush
and see Notepad and Clock run in CPU-crippling GPU-hogging
translucency.

[It turns on all my pixels!]

So crack open an ice cold Bud Lite, oh Chevalier of the Control Panel,
because whilst the rest of us wonder what Vista will bring, you
already know.

[Mr Impatient For Windows Vista Guy!]

Bud Light beer. Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri.

Re:Out of Cheese

[Jainith]

"Error: Out of Cheese"

is one of the error's produced by the alchi-mechanical computer at Hex the Unseen University in one of Terry Pratchett's Diskworld novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(Discworld)

Windows War Room

[dannannan]

I can just imagine the warteam conversation:

Test: File copy fails after 16K files! We can't ship like this!
Dev: The fix is easy and I can have it in tomorrow.
PM: 16K files? Only music pirates are gonna hit this. If anyone else sees this problem it goes away with a reboot, right?
Release Mgr: Won't fix!

never did work anyway

[XHIIHIIHX]

Windows has never been able to copy a large number of files. I've been trying to copy millions of files on windows boxes since 1997 and it never worked. Explorer usually just hangs, I guess OOM is an improvement. Install cygin. Use rsync. Done. Also should point out that you have to move folders like 5 times in vista before they finally move. No errors, source and destination remain partially copied over. Probably the same bug.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Chabil Ha']

Not really. This blog post got me out of Vista quite handily.

Copy 16,400 files???

[Brad1138]

With as slow as Vista is at copying files, it would take months to copy 16,400 of them.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[jargoone]

By "actual functionality", do you mean the ability to execute another program? My Windows XP systems do that just fine, and yes, they talk just fine to "server class" OSes.

If you mean something else, I'm curious what shell you use.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Nextraztus]

Exactly! Just lop enough significant figures off and you'll get back to the 2K bug conspiracy with 8.3!

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Nextraztus]

Task Manager also has some process names hardcoded into it that it wont let you kill, for example, csrss.exe.

seen this bug before...

[mathfeel]

Microsoft can't do math, remember? Just like excel2k7, When window counts the number of files and come up with 16400, it miscalculate to 1,000,000,000...no wonder the leak.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

Where are you shopping? Dell, HP, and Lenovo all offer XP on their laptops.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[amokk]

Well, consider the following situation.
I will admit that if you're copying extremely large files from disk, a multi-threaded file copy probably won't help much. However, if you are copying many hundreds of files of varying sizes, it makes a large difference. There will be more IO requests being processed by the OS. Now, modern OSes optimize IO requests by various criteria, so essentially, it can order the hard drive to seek in a more intelligent manner and therefore improve throughput.

Additionally, you could have many threads copying the same file, just in different chunks. Since a large file is extremely unlikely to be stored on the HDD in a completely non-fragmented and sequential fashion, the above argument applies.

You are still limited by the IO speed of the HDD, but you can substantially cut down on seek times with multithreaded file copying and intelligent IO requests. And considering that in many cases it takes longer for an HDD to seek than to read a block of data, the time savings add up in a very large way.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Beardo the Bearded]

When I upgraded my machines in 2003, I had Win98 on both of them. One has 512MB, the other has 768MB. Under Win98, they were both unstable. I upgraded one to Win2000 and the other to WinXP. They're both stable, and work just fine.

Remember that not everyone goes out and buys a new computer every time Best Buy says you should.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[justthinkit]

Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file.

Not true with XP, probably not true with Vista. I have seen this bug in earlier versions of Windows, however. I have also seen earlier than XP Windows versions fail to copy large numbers of files (around 3,000+ or so for Win98SE, if memory serves) and not tell the user that some files were not copied. XP seems to have fixed this staggering deficiency, but the "preparing to copy" waste of time is a seriously stupid thing in itself. PKZip for Windows had something similar, last I tried it. Very weird, especially when you provide PKZW with a file mask -- it should have just started zipping away (as the cmd-line version would).

There is still a place for cmd.exe based file operations, to say the least.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Runefox]

Yeah, they actually did, and in virtually exactly that manner, too, with also allowing you to "Take this action with all further conflicts". It even lets you select which file to use when overwriting files of the same name in a more logical way (lists both files as clickable selections with their dates, sizes, and other attributes right there) It's kind of neat, but then you remember you're using Vista and it kind of takes the wind out of your sails in more ways than one. I know I felt rather dirty the first time I'd seen Vista actually do something intelligent after my standards were set horribly low after launch; More specifically, the "Search Windows Update for Drivers" portion of the device manager actually works now, and on obscure hardware, too.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[justthinkit]

Someone else in this thread mentioned CachemanXP. This non-crippled shareware allows you to limit the amount of free RAM XP uses for file caching (and has a nifty "kill" option, for when you absolutely positively wanna toast the sucka -- the reason I checked it out).

Re:Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[Vegeta99]

2. The famed (File) Explorer bug where Explorer starts doing things such that, once it starts, you can't delete a folder without a reboot because it gives you a "file is in use" error -- along with the highly offensive suggestion to "please close the application in order to delete the file", which you can't do because it's Explorer. Ok, you can kill Explorer and (from the Task Manager window, do Run->explorer, but that's hardly obvious.)

 
So THAT'S what the problem is?! Jesus Christ.
 
You know what makes that worse? There's no easy way in Windows to tell what has the damn file locked, without Process Explorer.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[justthinkit]

Well, TFA mentions a specific A/V was running and is known to exacerbate the problem.
Nonetheless, there are issues. For example, not only is the second graphic not related to the first by OS version, it is not related by file copy differences. The video shows 3,809 files being copied, whereas the graphic compares 66,139 vs 17,899 files. 66,139 - 17,899 != 3,809. [And 32 minutes elapsed between the screenshots, but the file copy took about 3 minutes. Etc.]

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[antek9]

Or more like anywhere between three to five reboots away . . .

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[AHuxley]

no one needs more than 640p.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[geekoid]

It's a trick.
Some MS developer is trying to get information to fix the code.

The answers are:
Estimate remaining time. Yes, I have been forced to do this. I prefer letting them know how many files I applied the operation to and how many remaining.

"How do you handle infinitely recursing soft links?"
Easy: infinitely recursing bug fixes. (I get paid by the hour until it's fixed.)

Actually, you error if you can not find the file within x number of iterations. Also, watch where you are traversing the link to.
That's off the top of my head without really thinking about it. I am sure there are better ways that I don't remember.

16,399 files should be enough for anybody

[wardk]

probably redundant, didn't bother to read comments to find out

I had this problem

[neuroking]

I had this problem and it was driving me nuts. It is not a Vista problem. It is a Kaspersky problem that Kaspersky doesn't want to deal with (all other AV products work 'fine'), so quit whining about how horrible Vista is. It apparently has something to do with the way KAV keeps files in memory to scan before allowing them to be written to disc.

The hotfix should be open to everyone, but oh well. It takes two seconds to submit the request and they got it to me in about 1 hour. Now I can tell when I hit the 16,4---whatever limit. There is a kind of balk to the copy process, and sometimes an error which requires clicking "Try Again" once or twice. IT happens only once in the copy process, even if you multiple of that magic 16,blahblahbah number.

Names

[Frosty Piss]

It's a shame that Open Source chooses names that turn most people off.

Re:Names

[Just Some Guy]

It's a shame that Open Source chooses names that turn most people off.

Visio. Powerpoint. Nero. QuarkXPress. Acrobat. The only reason those don't sound at least as dumb is that you're used to them.

Re:Names

[Just Some Guy]

Bullshit. GIMP? Give me a fucking break. Idiot.

Your devastating rhetorical skills have demolished my position, and I respectfully concede the debate.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Swampash]

Simple.

Get a Mac.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[cibyr]

Problem is, many laptops don't have XP drivers. For example, the Dell 1720 doesn't have graphics drivers for XP.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

Yup. I've just about given up trying to copy gigabytes of files from large drives to backup drives because of this. I mean, once you've done this ONE TIME, it should be OBVIOUS to ANY designer that it needs to be fixed to allow the copy to continue - or resume - or SOMETHING other than just DYING.

Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file. The strange thing is, both of these are idiosyncracies of the explorer.exe shell. Both of these things work fine from the command line from within windows, and if you want lots of move/copy options, you use xcopy.

Which is sad, because clearly its not required for the OS to have these problems, but they exhibit these problems in the GUI shell, where the vast vast majority of people will encounter them.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

FYI, you have alot more control with XCOPY.

C:\>xcopy /? /V Verifies each new file. /C Continues copying even if errors occur.
   

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

For this kind of stuff, where its important that the copy goes right, or complains, then use another more appropriate tool, like XCOPY or (even better) ROBOCOPY.

Both of these are freely available tools made by MS for windows, and will give you much more reliability in what you're doing.

Who can copy 16,400 files anyway?

[r_jensen11]

Honestly, how can [Cancel or Allow] anyone co[Cancel or Allow]py that m[Cancel or Allow]any files anyway?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

TFA (where A = Author) is an idiot, and didnt bother to read the KB article which he linked to on his post.

From the KB article describing the problem, ie TRFA (where R = Real):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942435/en-us

This problem occurs because of a memory leak in the Windows OLE component. This memory leak is triggered by the way that Windows Explorer deals with the extended attributes of the files. This is 100% in the shell and UI layers, not in the kernel.

what r they smokin' in M$?

[wikinerd]

I remember not even Win95 could copy lots of files... Win98: The same. Win2k: The same. WinXP: The same. 12 years and still the same problem? I really don't remember about Win3.1 or Win286... If ever the Windows code gets open-sourced, lots of programming hackers are going to laugh for years upon seeing the buggy code, I am sure. How come people now have alternative choices and still use a buggy closed-source OS is beyond me. Poor Windows users... (happily posting from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 amd64 etch + some lenny).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[StikyPad]

Well, if you take a number and substitute the first occurrence of a each unique digit, and replace it with an L, then the subsequent occurrence with an O, then back to an L for the next, and repeat ad infinitum, and then use this formula on 666, you get LOL.

What do that tell you?

6666666!

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Gr8Apes]

why yes, I'd love to have transparent ssh connectivity to a variety of servers out there from the cmd prompt under windows. I've yet to see anything remotely approaching it (putty and its ilk do not count, it's a GUI program masquerading as a text screen.)

Heck, I'd like the ability to use a forward slash instead of a backwards slash (that's the universal escape character, not a path separator, and something MS should have given an option to change more than a decade ago when CPM, DRDOS, PCDOS, and OS/2 all fell by the wayside). And no, Cygwin certainly doesn't count, a yugo is a yugo....

And just in case you're thinking "Vista provides 'x'" that entire sentence or any like it is a non-starter as soon as "Vista" is included. An OS that cripples network connectivity because an audio file is being played or that becomes entirely unreliable once 14,600 or so files are copied is unreliable (in case you're wondering, every build I do today copies over 5K files, and a setup/SVN installation is about 3 times that. So that limitation immediately renders that "OS" entirely useless. In fact, it reminds me of the last MS clusterfuck foray into the server world - The Windows NT 4.0 page counter mismatch (fixed in 4.0 SP1, guaranteed corruption of memory/files/OS once you paged past 20 bits, kernel counter was 20 bit counter, memory counter was 32 bit.... oops) Oh, and should I also mention that SP1 won't include a fix for this "minor" issue?

Can we say "MS Who?" (You will be in less than 10 years.)

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

So you're saying you are too god damn stupid to consider multi-threading file copies?
You may have been coding for 25 years but that doesn't imply that you are any good at it.

Let me think, ummm, the RAM and CPU are much faster than the disk. No matter what you do, the disk will be the bottleneck. So, Do I create threads and more OS context switches for something that isn't going to be any faster, and may, in fact, be slower and cause other programs to be slower? I don't think so.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

Bingo. This is what separates the "coders" from the "developers." And for the record I've only been professionally writing software for about 6 years now. Though I started "coding" when I was a kid [e.g. 20 years prior].

The Ad hominem level here is ridiculous. I'm sure glad you feel comfortable impugning someone of whom you have no knowledge.

I like this the best:

Very likely it's just some extra data allocated per file when there is a hook [like AV] involved that isn't getting freed. As others pointed out copying files sans-antivirus seems to work just fine.

A guess about what it might be, then:

This is what debugging skills are about. Diagnose, differentiate, and reason. Don't just guess and then post flamebait on /. hehehe.

And you see no irony?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Whiteox]

Yes it does work for Win9x machines: using a ram drive for the swapfile, but hard to do on XP as the utilities aren't easy to find. I did find one ramdrive app that worked, but maxed out at 32mb which was useless.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

You're conjecture, while interesting doesn't really work on systems with file system caching that can do "scatter gather" at the file system and kernel level. The optimization happens behind the scenes.

At least for the last couple decades, the disk will ALWAYS be slower than the CPU and RAM, so no matter what you do, it will spend time waiting, and it doesn't make sense to introduce more context switches for the multiple threads coping to the same I/O bottleneck.

As for seek times on hard disks, that is so unpredictable. Modern hard disks only present cylinders and heads to the controller, most of the time there is bad sector remapping, internal sector redundancy like RAID, and other things that make modern disks "storage subsystems" almost completely divorced from the physical characteristics of a hard disk.

Real problem: Little indication of error

[gweihir]

This is what makes this an amateur level mistake. Sure, OS,shell and tool creators make mistakes. But what is absolutely critical for a professional product, is reliable, visible and meaningful error reports. Without them you can corrupt your data and notice only a long time later. This is completely unacceptable.

What mystifies me is that MS gets away with this stuff. They are producing a toy and for a toy, Winwos is pretty usable. But for anything that needs to work reliable, Windows is unfit. Seems to me too meny people do not undertand that it does not have to be like this and that there are alternatives ou there that meet professional standards.

Vista CAN copy over 16,000 files...

[RudeIota]

I call B.S. "Vista is crap" and "Vista sucks".. yeah yeah... but there's something else wrong here. I read mention of a possible virus scanner above, which may be the case. But I KNOW this doesn't affect a plain ol' install of Vista. I copy _tremendous_ amounts of data on a regular basis. I copy (Just using explorer, file by file) entire drives from different systems every few days onto my NAS box through my Windows Vista 'Business' PC. I've NEVER had an issue running out of memory (2GB RAM). In fact, just recently, I copied 29,912 files (70GB) from my girlfriend's XP computer using Windows Explorer in Vista. It copied just fine to my PC. Then I fired up her new Vista Home Premium laptop and copied those files over the network using her Windows Explorer. Everyone wants to rag on Vista - and yeah, it might be 'too little, too late' - but it works and plays well. It looks elegant and polished and it works almost no differently. Sure, there are applications that don't work well or at all in Vista, but who the hell expects _every_ software title to work with the successor to a SIX YEAR OLD OS? Give us (especially me) a break! ;) Zero hang ups. Zero issues. I rest my case.

Re:Vista CAN copy over 16,000 files...

[smash]

Watch it, you'll get marked "troll" posting support for vista here. Really, /. is not what it used to be when you could actually have an intelligent discussion on any particular topic. Sure, there's gems to be found still, but fuck - the signal:noise ratio is pretty abysmal.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[palndrumm]

Yeah, they actually did, and in virtually exactly that manner, too, with also allowing you to "Take this action with all further conflicts". It even lets you select which file to use when overwriting files of the same name in a more logical way (lists both files as clickable selections with their dates, sizes, and other attributes right there) It also gives you the option to Skip or Try Again when one of the files you're trying to overwrite is locked by some other process, rather than just spitting the dummy and stopping, which is really quite nice. To be honest, this feature is probably one of the main reasons why I'm still using Vista on my office PC rather than insisting that I be allowed to move back to XP.
(Although admittedly I still have my old XP PC sitting here so I can log on to it when I need to get some actual admin-type work done...)

Sarchasm

[adamofgreyskull]

sarchasm ('sär-"ka-z&m) : The giant gulf between what is said and the person who doesn't get it.

Mod GP +1 Funny, he's lost my mod now. Incidentally, the first three digits of my uid are 640...what are the chances? ;)

I've got a solution !

[udippel]

ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files [...]

Okay, here is the solution that should work:
sh -c "ulimit -v 500000; explorer.exe"

Oh, wait ...

Re:16,400 files copied should be plenty for most u

[dabooda]

Oh ffs Gates never said that!

hehe, a new class of bugs: legitimate bugs

[someone1234]

Nah, it is not a legitimate bug, it is a known bug.
It is still present in Solaris as of this writing (at least in the version we got here).
GPL Solaris might fix it.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[AftanGustur]

and then you take the 640, divide by 2, get 320, remove the last 0, and get 32, the reverse of 23.
Then you multiply 23 by 30, get 690, take 42, reverse it to 24 and subtruct this from 690. You get 666.
What does that tell you? Ha? Ha?

And if you add upp all the digits in the number 1 + 6 + 4 + 0 + 0 = 11

And 11 is 3 in binary.."The Holy Trinity" Mening that this bug signifies the war between good and evil..

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

actually this is one of the nice things about installing windows on a mac. you install windows (which involves one reboot) and then you install the apple drivers (I don't think this requires a reboot and it certainly doesn't require more than one). Contrast this to most PCs where you have to install loads of drivers seperately and often need to reboot in between.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

Reduce the amount of memory that is installed in your computer to 512 MB or less.
to be fair to MS that is the third workaround in the list and the first one (setting a size limit on the vcache) is far more sensible.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

imo a file copier should not have any need to count the number of files for anything other than non critical status display in the first place.

Anyone Wonders?

[eiapoce]

This explains why does the business market is refusing to adopt Windows Vista. "Where are those TPS reports???? Did you copy them?"
BTW I recall the old days when I had a Disk Operating System instead of windows I'd took for granted that vista had to be an improvement over that but I was wrong.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

I prefer letting them know how many files I applied the operation to and how many remaining.
the problem is to even do that you have to build the list of files to copy in advance of starting the copy.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[petermgreen]

or you could just buy with vista buisness (or ulitmate if you like throwing money away or you think you might want to go back to vista later and you want the extra features) and excercise your downgrade rights to XP pro. This method is almost certainly easier than trying to extract a refund from MS and also means you can upgrade back to vista in the future.

Sure you are technically paying for vista but I don't think there is any significant difference in price between XP pro and vista buisness for OEMs.

Vista

[Blimundus]

I can't copy that much files!

[cancel] [allow]

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[julesh]

Just put the think in the box and return it to the store.

I think you need to get your "think" back from the store and unpack it again.

Re:Just wondering...

[clickclickdrone]

>...why would anyone want to copy 16400+ files?
Clearly a man who never backs up his pr0n collection.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Mattsson]

Vote with your cash; Choose a Laptop from a corporation that let you choose XP, or maybe a Linux-dist if you already own a XP-license.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[tomstdenis]

Well we know that it's running out of memory. So it's a memory leak. Diagnose. Differentiate. It happens when there are hooks into the file system (e.g. in this case an AV is present). Reason. Likely since we're running out of memory when an AV is present, it has something to do with how the OS passes data to the AV and does not free it.

True, I'm just speculating, but it's a lot better reasoned than what the other poster came up with. Since the problem doesn't occur when an AV isn't present, it likely isn't a "multi-threaded" issue. If that were the case it would appear with or without the AV.

And my "attack" is based solely on experience. There are far more coders out in the wild than developers. If you can't tell me the difference between testing and verification, you're not a developer. If you can't describe a very modest design process, you're not a developer. etc. If you look at the quality of the vast majority of software, then say "why on Earth did they write it this was?" It was likely a coder who wrote it.

Not saying coders are stupid, but they solve problems in a very different way than developers. A developer solves a problem by analyzing the problem, gathering requirements, devising methods to test and verify the solution then implements it. A coder solves a problem by "writing just enough code" so the problem goes away. Coders for example, tend to write less modular code (e.g. reusable) than developers because they don't plan ahead to think about what could be re-factored and broken up. Coders typically don't write libraries for example. Writing a good library means you have to think about how other developers/coders will use it. It requires you to follow a design, do things sensibly without a vast re-invention of the wheel all the time, etc.

That being said, there is a need for coders in business. A good coder isn't stupid, they have experience and know how to turn a design document into software. But as I said, there are a lot of mediocre coders out there as well who are basically one step removed from being script kiddies.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[tomstdenis]

Not only that but many new disks introduce variants of NCQ which allows the controller to optimize requests based on locality. So likely the majority of seek operations are being optimized out at that level.

Tom

I see this on Vista, too

[RMH101]

...I've put in two Vista boxes (Dell preloads, but *clean* preloads) and both have exhibited similar symptoms. One one, unzipping a 12mb zip file took *twenty seven minutes" to complete, which I'd expect to take around 5 seconds on XP. During this time whilst I was sitting there tapping my fingers the progress bar stuck on "estimating time to copy" for the majority of it.
Copying files from SMB network shares is similarly slow: incredibly slow to mount, and glacial to copy. There's an MS hotfix available if you call PSS that purports to fix this, but I didn't notice an improvement. Turning off automatically generate file previews might speed it a little, but there's something very broken in the world of Vista file copying...

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[rincefire]

cpt.Obvious, is that you?

If he'd been smarter...

[Viol8]

..he'd have put the video & ROM at the bottom of memory and let general purpose memory start from wherever this finished. That way general memory could just continue on up no matter how much you put in instead of having to dick about with a load of page switching nonsense to avoid the top 384K if you had more than 1Meg...

Oblig. South Park ...

[DikSeaCup]

Nope, that's a Styx song.

"I'm sailing, away ... "

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[DikSeaCup]

Rebooting into Windows is so 2006... Tell me about it! Parallels, dude! If you have to reboot Windows, you can always use your favorite Mac based browser to websurf while your Windows install is rebooting.

Personally, I use a bootcamp partition with Parallels, but since the original Windows install, I've never actually booted the Mac into Windows.

Many thanks to C, again.

[master_p]

It was an OLE memory leak...which creates a great problem with a new O/S, potentially costing thousands of dollars or even millions if exploited by hackers.

The OLE mechanism is written in C/C++, isn't it? well, many thanks, again, for these wonderful languages that have made our life an adventure.

(when humanity will get to grips, we will perhaps use a more sane programming language for our O/Ses and services).

Something Nice About Vista

[Chili-71]

With all the Vista bashing in this thread, I'd like to say something nice about it: It looks pretty.

MOD PARENT UP

[Hyperhaplo]

It may not be absolutely correct (note that there is humour there), however, it hits the nail on the head.
Exactly why does Explorer need to 'verify' before deleting?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[stewbacca]

Here's a warning to anyone interested in Parallels and/or bootcamp.

I had a Bootcamp partition with a perfectly working version of XP pro that I used for about three or four months. Rebooting is fast. Rebooting into OS X takes about 15 seconds, and booting into XP is pretty quick (in spite of XP) taking about a minute or so until you get a fully working desktop. So I downloaded the Parallels 15 day trial. Worked pretty well, but definitely isn't as snappy as Bootcamp, but barely noticable. Then the trial period ran out on Parallels. I didn't really want to buy it, because I liked the speed of Bootcamp better (and many games didn't work in Parallels at that time). So I rebooted into XP and get the error: Windows could not start because of an error in the software - load needed DLLs for kernel. It seems that the Parlallels demo disabled something needed to boot up XP once the demo runs out.

So I ran out to the Apple Store and bought a fresh copy of Parallels 3.0 and it didn't undo whatever the demo did. Now I'm stuck, because my XP disks are in the UK and my household goods won't be here until December. I guess I have to call Parallel's tech support (because the Apple 'Genius' didn't want to take a stab at it, even though all I was asking is if others have had this problem). I hate tech support. Anyone have this problem? Is there a windows bootup key that I can hold down to get more options?

In anycase, I've used Parallels 3.0 on other machines, and their gaming support is still "optomistic" at best. Bootcamp, on the other hand, works great for games. Warcraft runs with the same FPS in Windows mode as it does in Mac mode, for example. for the record: 20" Intel iMac (white), 2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, ATI Radeon X1600 256MB video Thanks, and now I'll get back on topic.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

True, I'm just speculating, but it's a lot better reasoned than what the other poster came up with. Since the problem doesn't occur when an AV isn't present, it likely isn't a "multi-threaded" issue. If that were the case it would appear with or without the AV.

I have not seen that it documented that does not happen without AV

And my "attack" is based solely on experience. There are far more coders out in the wild than developers. If you can't tell me the difference between testing and verification, you're not a developer.

This is the pot calling the kettle black. We have neither code nor internal documentation, without in-depth analysis of the problem with a good debugger and tracing the execution, everything else is speculation.

I have no issue with your description of "coder" vs "developer" per se' but I think you miss something bigger. "Coders" and "developers" are a method of pushing computer science into the realm of blue collar work. Perhaps in this day with most of the important work behind us, at least is seems that way, programming is nothing more than a trade, certainly the current state of the industry shows that, but there was a time when "programmers" understood things like hash tables, trees, recursion, clock cycles, CPU caching, instruction execution time, I/O, etc.

Now, guys with a couple years working in the field with almost no education (not necessarily school mind you, but education such as books and basic curiosity and research), feel completely comfortable impugning people in place of proper argument.

In my book, if you have to insult, then you've already lost the argument, you just want smear the person who beat you. Smarter people see through this tactic, stupid people buy into it.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

Just put the think in the box and return it to the store.

I think you need to get your "think" back from the store and unpack it again.

Oh look! someone who thinks it is witty to pun a typo!! I bet you'll commemorate this day in finger paint.

Get a life.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Gr8Apes]

First of all, you're talking about a shell, not the terminal. Very true, didn't think I needed to make the distinction. It's called "Terminal" in OSX, but is merely a shell.

...Furthermore, contrary to the typical uninformed beliefs of OS X and Linux users, Windows has a relatively functional command interpreter and scripting. I don't personally like the scripting language, so I just install perl and use that instead. Works just fine most of the time. Certainly not as feature-rich as a BSD-derived shell, but functional enough for what is otherwise a consumer-grade system focused on simplifying computing tasks for end users. I'd disagree. It's so brain-dead that it becomes next to useless. The only reason I still use it is because explorer itself is so fubar'd at this point that I sometimes need to use the shell to see a directory's contents within a reasonable time. The ability to run another library within it is irrelevant, as I could just as easily say you could run Cygwin... Hey, look at that, I did.

Heck, I'd like the ability to use a forward slash instead of a backwards slash

You can. In fact, I always do. The only exception is if you use UNC paths. The ability to use forward slashes is so inconsistent that you're better off using backslashes everywhere on a windows system. But the ability to sometimes use them isn't the point. The point is that the backslash was an incompatibility introduced consciously into DOS and propagated throughout MS's OS line and could have at least been settable with the advent of NT.

An OS that cripples network connectivity because an audio file is being played or that becomes entirely unreliable once 14,600 or so files are copied is unreliable

XP doesn't do either of those things, and Vista is widely criticized both inside and outside the Microsoft user base. I believe that segment explicitly addressed Vista, not XP. Nice red herring.

I love how your ilk are so typically ill-informed about the things you hate. Maybe before you insist on criticizing other systems, you should actually use them first. I have to help support OS X machines for our print ad guys, Windows machines for everyone else, and I use BSD machines to build web apps and manage the servers that are my responsibility. They all seem to work just fine for the things they've been built to do, but maybe competently running an IT department with a blind eye to arbitrary things like who's company logo is on the box is just something M$-loving astroturfers do, huh? I love your assumptions. My weakest OS is Irix, followed by HPUX, BSD, Linux, and Solaris, even though I own boxes that are currently running 3 of those at home and have worked with them for the past 13 or so years. And yet they're my weakest OSes. So perhaps I'm not astroturfing MS, but actually may have a background peppered with MS failures and even been the victim of a strong-arm tactic or two of theirs? Naah, that couldn't possibly be the case since some small network admin claims competence over sharing some printers and a web app or two.

Perhaps one day I'll detail some of MS's shortcomings in my journal. Then I can just point to that whenever some troll comes along.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[hesiod]

> Contrast this to most PCs where you have to install loads of drivers seperately and often need to reboot in between.

Amazingly, most of them don't demand you reboot before installing another driver. They ASK you to reboot, but you can say "no", install the rest of your drivers and software, and reboot once everything is done -- if you want. You can usually keep going without even that reboot. You don't have to mindlessly click "OK" every time a dialog box comes up.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[mhall119]

I would imagine the OP was thinking of 65535, the maximum number of different values that can be represented by a 16 bit integer.

Short answer: no.

[SEMW]

Long answer: see "Short answer"

No. RTFA.

[SEMW]

It's a memory leak related to large NTFS alternate data streams, not any fundamental limit. If you're not running Kaspersky (which attaches data streams to every file) and you don't specifically use alternate data streams, it shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[CastrTroy]

Great. Now if they could just provide an option for resizing the desktop wallpaper without adjusting the aspect ratio, I'd actually have a reason to like Vista.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[LearnToSpell]

Oh, you've found that too?

http://shotgun.shacknet.nu:81/copy.jpg

...Or not.

[SEMW]

The average home user may actually have this kind of problem - since downloads to the tmp directory are then copied to the correct folder once downloads are complete. Update EQII, WOW & FFXI & you've gone a long ways towards 16K files. Add in patch Tuesday, and your average user is probably going to hit real close to 16K files if they try to keep the PC up for a month... [etc] No. The memory leak is is related to 16k+ files with non-trivial NTFS alternate data streams. Which none of the files you mention will have. Since when has the "average home user" even known what alternate data streams are, let alone been playing around with them?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[SEMW]

Documents. Web pages. Download a Web page and you get a bunch of files. Download a bunch of Web pages and you get an even bigger bunch of files. Do that for a couple years, you'll have thousands of files. ...None of which will have non-trivial NTFS alternate data streams, which means the bug TFA talk about will not be relevent (unless you're running Kaspersky).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[marcosdumay]

"Windows wastes time scanning the source directory for no apparent reason since it won't tell you you have insufficient disk space to complete the operation until the target drive runs out of disk space..."

No. When removing a file, Windows will always tell you beforehand if you lack disk space for the operation. It is a feature, stop complaining.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[julesh]

Whereas you seem to get off on belittling other people for daring to make a joke. Get over it, troll.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[marcosdumay]

Not to disapoint you, but soft-link recursion is a solved problem. You simply manage them differently from hard links and it becomes easy to detect cycles at the directory graph.

But for copying files, you simply copy the soft links. Why did you even consider parsing them?

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Goaway]

I never said it was not a solved problem. I said it was not trivial, like the original poster thought.

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[mlwmohawk]

Whereas you seem to get off on belittling other people for daring to make a joke. Get over it, troll.

A joke? Seriously? If one can not fight back after an attempt was made to insult, then insults should be stopped. And you have the nerve to call me a troll.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[scrad]

Actually, I have 2 gig of ram on my system and when I do large file copies it slows down significantly but it's not due to swapping as suggested.

I've looked at the system and the cpu usage is medium, but disk i/o goes to 100%. Even though DMA is pretty fast, IDE disks still generate a ton of interrupts to move the data. Especially when you are using a journaling file system.

In my computer there's no swapping going on, it's all the switching from protected mode to user mode, and managing interrupts. Remember that an OS can nicely switch from task to task so we see a nice, responsive system. But it CAN'T ignore interrupts while it finishes drawing your window. That's why they're called 'interrupts' :)

Linux is a little better, but copying lots of files will drag the system for similar reasons.

If disks weren't so 'fast' it wouldn't be a problem. But when your disk can move 20MB / sec through the system, what else does the cpu have time to do?

Re:We *ALL* need to give Microsoft a dope slap

[tomstdenis]

You underestimate the amount of turnover at a company like MSFT. I suspect the true "in the blood" comp.sci nerds at MSFT are not working on explorer.exe or kernel32.dll, etc.

Which is why a lot of the seemingly simpler things are routinely getting done wrong.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Wolfrider]

--BACKUPS ARE YOUR FRIEND - he says, With (4) fingers pointing back at him - after JUST reinstalling Win2kPro IN A VM because it sh1t 1tself... ;-)

--Seriously, I'd be interested in your resolution of this problem. Call PL's tech support; and in the future, always do a DD (or the like) of your partition before messing with it...

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Wolfrider]

--Hey, thx for the CachemanXP plug. I'm gonna try it out on my p750 Dell laptop and see if it makes a diff.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Gr8Apes]

Because feeding AC trolls is fun!!!

That doesn't mean anything. That's the sort of thing people say when they're just making up fake problems to blame on Windows because it's Windows.

FUBAR = Fucked Up Beyond All Repair/Recognition - take your choice. I've listed a couple of ways it's broken already. Here's another one - the explorer clippytized "search feature". It doesn't. Worked pre-XP.

Baloney. It supports piping, redirection, echo on/off, command history, etc. etc. You can even simulate backgrounding of applications by simply calling command.com and passing your app to be "disconnected" from the "shell" as its argument. If you want to actually daemonize a process, you can do so with the built-in VB scripting.

The laughability of MS's shell's scriptability is well-documented.

It's not inconsistent at all. You can use forward slashes anywhere that you're not using a UNC path. Windowss will happily work with either directory separator. If you use forward slashes in an argument, you just have to quote the argument

Hmm, the quoting does work, but you lose tab completion. It's still a hack and windows obviously doesn't "happily work" with either separator. Thanks for pointing out the effect quotes though.

I believe that segment explicitly addressed Vista, not XP. Nice red herring.

It's not a red herring and I suspect you know you're lying about it being one. I specifically pointed out that XP was a valid alternative to Vista's inadequacy. YOU brought up another Vista inadequacy, pointlessly, when nobody had even attempted to invalidate your original complaint about it.

I brought it up in order to prevent the argument that "Well, Vista has x" in relation to a new shell. Whatever Vista has or does not has is irrelevant as it is not an option due to other failings.

I love your assumptions ... Naah, that couldn't possibly be the case since some small network admin claims competence over sharing some printers and a web app or two.

Too rich.

Perhaps one day I'll detail some of MS's shortcomings in my journal. Then I can just point to that whenever some troll comes along.

And, of course, no fanboy breakdown would be complete without trying to dismiss a documented series of misinformation and poor understanding by simply calling the adversary a "troll" in a vain attempt to be the last comment on the subject in the hopes that everybody will see that and just ignore the rest of the thread. I doubt someone is going to read the last line and think that's it.

- You confused a "terminal", a "shell", and a "command interpreter".

Nope, not at all. Maybe you did, but I certainly did not. I did state that OSX's "Terminal" (quotes included, as it is the name Apple gave to their application that embodies the shell/command interpreter) as being far superior to MS's Command Prompt/Command line, whatever you want to call it.

- You didn't know that you can use / as a directory separator in Windows - something that has been true for many, many years now.

I just clarified that yes, it's still broken. Next:

- You made an arbitrary claim that your copy of explorer is "FUBAR"ed, whatever that means, but didn't explain how it came to be that way, what you're doing with it, when it occured, or what might have trigger this non-descript, mysterious problem.

It's inherently broken on every copy of XP. I've actually had it BSOD the machine when attempting to view a directory with only about a hundred large zip files. The search feature is also broken.

I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. I think you're like a lot of other anti-Microsoft zealots: you heard a buzzwords about OS X and Linux on Slashdot and other tech sites, saw a couple of people who probably actual

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Wolfrider]

--Running win98xx still makes sense if it's in something like a P2V Vmware VM (preferable on a Linux host).

--Running ME makes NO sense whatsoever, in *any* situation. ;-)

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Wolfrider]

--I highly recommend you use something like 7-zip or WinRAR for your personal-file backups. It compresses AND can include RECOVERY data in the archive file(s).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[jsiren]

The file copy progress indicator I'd like to see: Instead of remaining time, just show elapsed time and "n of m files copied (k errors)". When finished, if k>0, show errors and leave those files selected which weren't copied without errors.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[marcosdumay]

But for copying it is trivial.

MOD PARENT UP

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Now, that was useful. Thanks.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Allador]

Yes you can. Though in all honesty, you probably dont want to pay for premium on the precision.

What you can't get is an Inspiron or a Vostro. And Dell doesnt make a 17" in the Latitude.

Of course, this is mostly due to the fact that Dell doesnt have a business class laptop in 17". They have consumer level garbage (inspiron, vostro) in a 17", and an engineering workstation (precision), but no latitude in a 17".

The deal with Dell and XP is that you can get XP or Vista on all their business class machines. And despite their marketing, that doesnt include the Vostro's.

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Well... yes, I know.

And 16383, which is both much nearer to what OP said and what the article is talking about, is the highest number that can be represented by 13 bits. It's not unusual to reserve the uppermost few bits for additional information, which would (well, kind of :-) ) offer an explanation for this MS bug.

Take 16 bits for number of files to be copied, reserve the uppermost 3 bits for something wierd, count the files copied... come over the 13 bits limit (i.e. try to copy the file #16384) -> counter jumps to 0 (the lower 13 bits) and the lowest of the 3 reserved "wierd" bits jumps to one, causing the bug to appear, while nobody checked for that condition.

For example, this can lead to DIV BY ZERO, if the total number of files to be copied (say, 20000) is being divided by the number of files already copied (which just jumped to 0 in our example).

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[tigerhawkvok]

Taskkill /f is your friend.

I havn't used XP in about a year and a half, though ... but I am pretty sure its there (at least in XP Pro).

Screenshot for you

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[mink]

That people have not updated to the new Beast numbering of 616.