Coolest. Windows. Feature. Ever.

I have to say - the Windows feature that I love the most is the one where - you want to copy about 50 gigs of files so you start the process at night and then you wake up in the morning with Windows asking you if you want to move a read only file, because, I mean, lord forbid you move a read only file, that would be like, crazy, and then you say "Ok", check back a few hours later and see that it has done about 5 more files and is now asking you if you want to move a system file.

Yeah, I love that.

(Ok, rant over.)

Comments (39) May 15, 2007 8:15 AM Views: 3298

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Kyle Hayes's Gravatar I know isn't that a great feature! I use that one all the time...wait...no I don't, I'm on a Mac :-P
# Posted By Kyle Hayes | 5/15/07 8:27 AM
Lola LB's Gravatar Yes, that's really unintuitive. Wonder what bright genius came up with this at MS. If I want to move a large directory, then by gosh, just do what I tell you with out asking any questions . . .
# Posted By Lola LB | 5/15/07 8:40 AM
Scott P's Gravatar try xcopy instead of using explorer.

xcopy /S /Q /R /H /Y c:\source d:\destination
# Posted By Scott P | 5/15/07 8:42 AM
Damien McKenna's Gravatar I discovered that one recently, great stuff.
# Posted By Damien McKenna | 5/15/07 8:46 AM
Raymond's Gravatar another great one is not telling you before hand that what you're trying to move won't fit, and then just moving some of the files and stopping when it runs out of space
# Posted By Raymond | 5/15/07 9:24 AM
Joel Cox's Gravatar What is required here, obviously, is a big "Yes, dammit" button in the dialog box.
# Posted By Joel Cox | 5/15/07 9:30 AM
Steini Jonsson's Gravatar Yes... I love that feature too ;-)
Try supercopier... great tool... you can even suspend your file transfer... save it... and come back to it later..
http://supercopier.sfxteam.org/modules/mydownloads...
# Posted By Steini Jonsson | 5/15/07 9:34 AM
Steini Jonsson's Gravatar Oh... and it will also tell you if there isn't enough space... ;-)
# Posted By Steini Jonsson | 5/15/07 9:36 AM
robs's Gravatar so don't make your xxx collection readonly.. and don't put it in a system folder either =)
# Posted By robs | 5/15/07 10:11 AM
Mark W. Breneman's Gravatar Ah yes, The craptastic windows copy. My Favorite is the preparing to copy that take 20 mins, then all of the "are you sure?" messages, then the time remaining: 32 mins oh, I mean 90 mins, no I mean 5 min... oh wait sorry I was really wrong... 1,374,8374 mins, ah well it will really take 2+ hours .

So one has to ask, what was the 20 mins of preparing to copy for?

Not a bit John C. Dvorak fan but he does have a good rant on this very topic.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2123848,00.as...
# Posted By Mark W. Breneman | 5/15/07 10:20 AM
Will's Gravatar Another one to try is Robocopy, it's actually part of the Windows Resource Toolkit and you can download it for free. It's about the best file copy tool out there for windows... it's command line, but it has about a gagillion options including, retries, logging, mirroring, etc. I use it to keep my backup drive synched with my laptop and it works wonderfully. You can tell it to ignore any errors (which are usually only caused by system files in use) and it does read-only files without a problem.. Plus it's much faster than trying to do it in explorer.
# Posted By Will | 5/15/07 10:22 AM
Sam's Gravatar My favorite is when it adds like 1/2 again as much time to the process by sitting there calculating how long it will take.
# Posted By Sam | 5/15/07 10:22 AM
John Allen's Gravatar Windows ROCKS. I love the non-alphabetizing start menu. So intuitive.
# Posted By John Allen | 5/15/07 10:39 AM
Kris Brixon's Gravatar This is an important lesson for us as programmers.

When you can replace the text of a button with "Do you want to work today?" and the click rate would be the same, then you most likely don't need the button.
# Posted By Kris Brixon | 5/15/07 10:57 AM
James Moberg's Gravatar I hate that... because of this issue I started using SyncBack and I have yet to regret using it. I use it to back up all my data to a portable USB drive.

It can copy open files, encrypt your data, versioning, compression, high performance FTP, throttling, incremental backups and works with Vista.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub...
# Posted By James Moberg | 5/15/07 11:02 AM
Mick's Gravatar I have an external usb drive and everytime I try to copy a large onto it, say 200mb+, it throws a write delayed failed error. After some research I think it's to do with the windows usb driver. Does anybody know a work around for this issue (e.g. a program that verify that 100% of data is written on the disk successfully). Thanks
# Posted By Mick | 5/15/07 11:07 AM
hibiscusroto's Gravatar fellow commenter James Moberg is right...SyncBack is awsome.
# Posted By hibiscusroto | 5/15/07 11:07 AM
Rob's Gravatar Actually, Ray, I think you're missing the much cooler feature in Windows when copying files. It's complete awesome when you are trying to copy a whole bunch of files and one of them fails to move for some reason (like you didn't realize that Word failed to close fully, and so it's still holding the file open), which of course means that we actually wanted to stop the entire process, instead of continuing to copy the rest of the files, and of course, since Windows also copies files in an apparently random order, you now have no way to tell which files have moved and which haven't, so you try to move the whole directory over and give yourself carpal tunnel by having to click "No" about a thousand times to keep it from wasting time copying the files that succeeded last time, and because in the wonderful usability testing done in Redmond, "Yes to All" is essential, but "No to All" would just be crazy.
# Posted By Rob | 5/15/07 11:19 AM
Lance's Gravatar @Rob - you said it! What's up with no "No to All?" Who was the genius who said "That'll never work!". C'mon!!!!
# Posted By Lance | 5/15/07 12:00 PM
Damien McKenna's Gravatar It should be also added that this is a perfect example of why some people use Directory Opus (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/) - it's awesome.
# Posted By Damien McKenna | 5/15/07 12:10 PM
Justice's Gravatar Steini Jonsson suggested SuperCopier, I downloaded, and its totally awesome. True progress meter, customizable interface, completely replaced any windows copy (drag copy or ctrl-c/v) and if you minimize the copy, you get a nice littler percentage in the system tray. Completely rocks, and totally free. I swear I dont work for em, but I stuck this puppy on my thumb drive =)
# Posted By Justice | 5/15/07 12:22 PM
TJ Downes's Gravatar John, you can alphabetize the start menu by going into your start menu folder and sorting.... yes. its that easy.

As Scott P said, xcopy is the way to copy large file sets without needing to respond to prompts.

Mick, I am guessing you are using USB 1.1? try this http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?am...

Frankly, every complaint here has a fairly simple solution, and probably takes less time to research than it does to complain about it.
# Posted By TJ Downes | 5/15/07 12:34 PM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar Geeze TJ - I was half complaining, half joking. Chill. ;) Although I'm happy folks took it seriously enough to suggest alternatives. (Not that I'll be using Windows again.)
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 5/15/07 12:39 PM
TJ Downes's Gravatar Ray, its the simple fact that the blogs are swarming with people bagging on Windows. The complaints are simply a lack of knowledge on the part of the user. Frankly, I use Macs from time to time and I find a lot frustrating about them, but I also understand it's my lack of knowledge with the OS that makes it so difficult for me to use. I don't blame the OS, I blame me.

So basically, it's frustrating to see so many folks making a what is a pretty decent product out to be such a piece of shit when it really isn't.
# Posted By TJ Downes | 5/15/07 12:52 PM
Justice's Gravatar TJ,

I think what a lot of poeple (myself included) are complaining about is that these simple things have not been fixed, in many revisions of windows. Instead of re-writing core windows functions for speed / usability, they plop on more eye-candy and a host of new incompatabilities. This leaves their long time user base in the lurch with many of the same problems the software always had. I think if we make enough noise, maybe they will get fixed.

Chris
# Posted By Justice | 5/15/07 1:22 PM
David Harris's Gravatar There's an old joke about this...goes like this:

Apple User to Windows User: "What OS do you use?"
Windows User to Apple User: "Windows"
Apple User to Windows User: "Are you sure?"

...I'm always surprised how many people don't get that...
# Posted By David Harris | 5/15/07 3:54 PM
Raymond Camden's Gravatar I'll bite. I don't get it. ;)
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 5/15/07 3:58 PM
David Harris's Gravatar ...when you click on a file and press delete on a file, what does windows ask?
...when you are copying a read only file, what does windows ask?
...when you attempt to delete an EXE file, what does windows ask?

...OK, I admit it, is a lame joke, but talk to ANYONE you knows me, and they'll tell you it's the only sort I know!
# Posted By David Harris | 5/15/07 4:09 PM
Dave Shuck's Gravatar "<i>It should be also added that this is a perfect example of why some people use Directory Opus (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/) - it's awesome.</i>"

... or Linux

(it had to be said)

:)
# Posted By Dave Shuck | 5/15/07 4:12 PM
mr. closets's Gravatar Yeah I got a hundred of those complaints but what are going to do? Windows is everywhere and everyone uses it, so if you want your computer to play nice with other computers you have to use it.
# Posted By mr. closets | 5/15/07 4:18 PM
Justin Carter's Gravatar Bah, I'm with TJ, most of these gripes with Windows can be put down to lack of knowledge or have trivial solutions which I'm sure OS X users would be only to quick to point out if it were about their precious OS :P

Prompts are necessary before read-only files are moved because moving a read-only file is just as potentially disastrous as changing it. Same goes with system files. Same goes with files that are in use, or files that already exist at the destination location! Blindly moving files in those situations and having the OS pick the right answer every time is impossible! It Ray's case, yeah it's annoying if the prompts are spread out across a file operation that takes hours, but I have a feeling Vista has addressed this somewhat, particularly where a file is in use and cannot be moved you can now skip the file and the whole move operation won't crap out like it did in XP.

Windows XP's start menu can be sorted by right clicking on it and choosing 'Sort by name'. Windows Vista's start menu always stays sorted by name (as are folder views on the local file system).

'No to all' can be done by shift-left clicking on 'No'.

There needs to be some kind of super wiki so that every time someone has a "Stupid Windows can't do X" they can look it up and get a real answer, rather than spreading more misinformation (like the No to All one which has been around for almost 10 years, since Windows 98).

Instead of flaming the other OS (not pointing at you Ray), I like to see solutions or workarounds, or at least civil discussion which so far this thread has almost provided :)
# Posted By Justin Carter | 5/15/07 6:49 PM
Scott P's Gravatar folks sure took you seriously.
# Posted By Scott P | 5/15/07 7:50 PM
zac spitzer's Gravatar My favorite is when you try and copy a 3gb file to a FAT32 drive, no feed back other than disk full whilst explorer still says 16Gb free.

Does Windows Me II (vista) have a threaded explorer yet?
# Posted By zac spitzer | 5/15/07 8:47 PM
Justin Carter's Gravatar Threaded as in multiple processes for the various parts of the shell (desktop, taskbar, etc)? Or having each explorer window running in separate processes? Or both? Because you've been able to do those since Windows 98 as well :)

http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/950/...
http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/769/...

Unless by "threaded" you mean that multi-pane view that Finder has? No great loss there, haha.

And FAT32 file size limit is ~4GiB, so a 3GB file should be perfectly OK ;)
# Posted By Justin Carter | 5/15/07 9:24 PM
Matt Osbun's Gravatar The great thing is how M$ integrated this feature into the Shutdown process so I can press the computer's power button, go to bed, and wake up the next morning to see an ever-so-helpful dialog box asking me if I want to save a file (Yes/No/Abort).
# Posted By Matt Osbun | 5/16/07 7:13 AM
Adam's Gravatar When there's no "Yes to all" button, hold down shift while clicking "Yes." When there's no "No to all" button, (you guessed it!) hold down shift while clicking "No."

It's very poorly documented, but the functionality isn't missing. ;)
# Posted By Adam | 5/16/07 8:22 AM
James Edmunds's Gravatar You should really check out Vista, where the new, improved Windows Explorer is on the verge of usable! Well, almost.
# Posted By James Edmunds | 5/16/07 9:30 AM
Dave Shuck's Gravatar Interesting. I can no longer say that I have never heard anyone say anything positive about Vista... I think!
# Posted By Dave Shuck | 5/16/07 9:34 AM
Joshua Curtiss's Gravatar I love it when a Windows user's response to a complaint over something simple like copying files is a command line with a bunch of command line arguments. Because THAT'S what I want to do when I'm just trying to do a file copy.

>;-D
# Posted By Joshua Curtiss | 5/17/07 1:09 PM
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