Estimated Transfer Time Is No More In Windows 8 456
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!"
Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
You all knew it was coming [xkcd.com] ;)
Teracopy (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps they should just buy teracopy
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:0, Insightful)
I hate you so much.
Terrible summary & headline (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Slashdot. Why would TFA have given anyone any idea about anything? That would have required reading it, and that never happens. Ever.
What about search? (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder...
- was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug?
- or did they think it's not important enough?
There was another (less) famous bug: notepad not able to deal with word-wrap correctly - not sure if they fixed this one in Vista+ (that was happening in the latest XPs).
So how do you calculate how long it will take to copy files? On the same device? Between physical devices? Between different interfaces (SATA -> USB)? Across a network? What if the system is thrashing and busy? What if there's network traffic? What if a cluster of bad sectors is discovered and it's trying to relocate them on the fly? Is it verifying the copy? Are all selected files from the same location? Are there links? Sparse files? Will the server have to bring a tape unit online? Copying on different partition formats? What about alternate data streams? Will a virus scanner inspect them? ACLs between different domains?
With so many conditions and edge cases and minutia, simply projecting estimates from sampled speed data seems like a pretty good compromise if you want an estimate of the time. Problem is, people don't understand it's an estimate. An exact prediction of the future would be nice, but I don't want to sit for 50% of the total copy time while the computer does the maths required to make that perfect deterministic calculation ala Star Trek.