Slashdot Mirror
Estimated Transfer Time Is No More In Windows 8
MrSeb writes "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That's (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled and it's about time!"
You all knew it was coming ;)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
1302481501461469 minutes until this feature is completed.
It'll be replaced by a dialog box saying, "It's done when it's done"?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Perhaps they should just buy teracopy
Finally catching up to ftp and kermit
First, I've never seen the progress bar in a Windows file transfer progress bar slide 'back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way'. I've seen progress bars that do that, and but I've never seen a Windows file transfer dialog do that. The estimation can jump around like crazy at times, but the progress bar was always fine (since, I assume, it's simply based on # of files completed). Maybe Windows 98 did that? I don't remember it doing that, but its been a while. Certain XP, Vista & Windows 7 don't.
Second, if you RTFA the estimated transfer time is currently still there; its just downplayed.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
* Drive letters - WTF???
* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...
* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media
* No application bundles
* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!
You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.
Wow, I guess I am out of touch with windows flaws. I quit running windows back at windows 3.1.
Ill stick with Linux until windows is ready for the desktop. ;P
I wish the transfer window created had a pause function, and was actually a queue so that I could queue up more files for the same action (copy/move).
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I think you meant to say "... performs better with larger files".
You nailed it though. My big gripe with Windows it how it seems to spend more time fiddling with metadata / directory entries than the actual contents. On an SSD with 700mb/sec writes and 0.1 msec access times, I'd expect it to churn through a few thousand files per second at the very least. That's not even factoring the disk cache. All those MFT updates seem to drag it right back down to spinning-disk speeds when dealing with numerous small files. You know, like a source tree or a directory full of images.
As sequential storage performance continues to improve, filesystem overhead is becoming the primary bottleneck.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Chuck Norris copied a file in Vista. Once.
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
I'm still mad about the (basically) neutered search capability for desktop/LAN files in Windows 7.
What used to be a consistent
"right-click, choose 'Search', enter 'filename' OR 'phrase in file', tick off search parameters, optionally expand and enter detailed parameters, hit 'Search' button->Results"
workflow has been 'simplified' to
"enter your search string in this little text window and we'll search inside every goddamn file in this directory/subdirectory (oh, and across teh internets and rifling through your emails too, if you want!) for that search term, no matter how long it takes -> wait for freaking ever -> more results than you ever needed, or no results if it's a system file, not in an indexed location or Windows simply doesn't like it for some reason. Oh, you want additional search parameters? Good luck finding any besides filesize and date modified!"
You used to be able to re-enable old-style search on Vista (somewhat), but I guess they thought it was too much of a dinosaur (or too useful, perhaps) to include in Win 7. Bah. Get off my lawn!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.
BSD, Linux and MacOS allow you to do that, and even delete or overwrite the file while it's still locked without causing problems. Moving, deleting or renaming a file affects only a hardlink to the file and not the file itself; and overwriting a file is actually just deleting a hardlink and writing to a completely new file.
You seem to be about the only responder in this thread who actually understands how files work.
It's pretty sad that people don't understand the pseudo-atomicity of the POSIXish way of handling file names (as opposed to files).
(You could also have mentioned the distinction between file handles and inodes (and lazy unlinking) to explain the "program can write to a deleted file without causing harm" bit, but whatever.)
HAND.
Using such a program has a very good chance of causing random file corruption:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.windowsconfidential.aspx
"Forcing a handle closed is equivalent to reaching into a program and freeing some memory. The program thinks the handle (or memory) is still valid and will continue to use it. But since the handle is really free, it will be reused for something else."