The Windows 8 Copy Dialog Box

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/29/2012 10:03:00 AM
Posted in Trade Shows , Operating Systems , Microsoft , Windows 8

Microsoft revamped the Copy Dialog box in Windows 8. You now get useful visualizations of the progress and speed of your file copy. You can also pause/resume individual copies if you're doing many in parallel. Microsoft also claims that file copies now properly resume if you put your system to sleep and wake it up later.

Print This Article 13 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment nice, but... by dgingeri on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 This is nice and all, but did they finally fix the problem where running into a file that's in use causes a cancel and we have to start over? Better yet, if a file is in use, it skips the file and copies the rest while waiting for a response to the dialog box? dgingeri Reply RE: nice, but... by gdinero79 on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 Hasn't that been fixed since Vista? It doesn't automatically skip and keep going in the background but it definitely doesn't cancel the entire process. gdinero79 Reply RE: nice, but... by hackztor on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 Last time I read that it would skip those files and put them last with the dialog box. hackztor Reply RE: nice, but... by ksherman on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 I read that too. Windows 7 kinda does that, but it seemed to have a mixed track record.

These are some nice little improvements. Heavily considering a move back to Windows from OS X. Lion and Mountain Lion have shifted away from a getting-things-done OS and are catering to a different customer. I've always like Windows 7 and am glad I have it on my desktop at home. ksherman Reply RE: nice, but... by star-affinity on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 ”Lion and Mountain Lion have shifted away from a getting-things-done OS”

Just curios – what makes you think that? I don't think the later versions of Mac OS X has lost anything, rather things have been added.

Windows 8 seems nice and all (this copy feature seems like a good improvement) but I still find OS X to be a good OS with overall fewer steps to perform most tasks. star-affinity Reply RE: nice, but... by ericloewe on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 It's fixed in Windows 7 as far as I can tell: The operation *does* go on, but the prompt appears as soon as the error appears. ericloewe Reply A more serious question by Pessimism on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 Why did this take Microsoft seventeen years to implement? This should have been in Windows 95. The worldwide collective quantity of hair pulling infuriation at Windows' terrible handling of basic copy, move and delete operations is.... significant. Pessimism Reply RE: A more serious question by apinkel on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 It does seem like an obvious thing... although I can't think of another major operating system's file manager that has a better implementation than what already exists in windows 7. I'd hope there's a good reason no-one has implemented this to-date.

It might be because when doing file operations over a network the stats about the file operation just aren't available due to limitations of the network api. This is pure speculation though. apinkel Reply RE: A more serious question by sprockkets on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 Not to be elitist, but KDE on Linux had the ability to not crap on one file not being able to be copied since like 2003 or earlier, plus reported the speed. KDE4 introduced some years ago start/stop file xfers. With DBUS on Gnome if you started other file xfers it would qeune them instead of trying to do all of them at once very slow due to how most traditional HDDs work.

Of course KDE4 is an abomination. sprockkets Reply Learn to walk before trying to compete in the 100M dash? by DukeN on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 Perhaps MS can bring file copy performance to XP levels atleast.

Win 7 is horribly slow compared to XP for simple (and large) file copies. Maybe Windows 8 can fix the speed issue first, before bloating up another simple thing. DukeN Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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