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Posted by Nicholas Brookins on 2 June, 2008I recall first using Windows 3.1 and thinking it was pretty cool - but man they needed to do somthing about the file manager. I was a DOS user, accustomed to xcopy and the superb XTree 
and XTreeGold applications. I’m not asking for too much - just the basic abilities xcopy offers, like continuation after an error, copying files after a newer date, and the like. You know though, Windows 95 was just a few years around the corner - I was sure they would fix the basics by then.
Windows 95 didn’t do much for file management, other than eliminate the MDI interface we were just getting used to. In fact, the notoriously bad progress message during file operations just made things worse - it wouldn’t even tell us how fast the bytes were moving. I set to work on a shell extension to add some of the xcopy goodness to Windows Explorer.
Alas, a shell extension of that sort was a bit beyond my Pascal and BASIC skills so I set to learning C++. I also promptly forgot the reason I started down that path. There always seemed like something more important at the time, but every once in a while I’d be copying a group of files only to be shot down by a silly error like “Cannot copy - The file exists” and my old dreams of a better copy mechanism would surface.
Fast forward 11 years to the release of Windows Vista. Sure, it somehow manages to be sluggish with just basic UI operations on a 3GHz system, a full 45 times the clock speed of my first Windows 95 machine. Without the Aero interface.
With no programs running. But finally - yes Microsoft has heard my plea! Vista has a file management interface that rivals any on the market. It asks intelligent questions when a file can’t be moved or copied. It even shows the current transfer speed. I guess it’s a shame that it turns out many file operations are considerably slower in Vista
Server 2008 seems to have all the good from Vista, with significantly less of the bad. I recently upgraded a 2GHz machine, slow by Vista standards, to Server 2008 and it has been running remarkably well. The dialogs and consoles seem more intelligently laid out, and the O/S was refreshingly bare until I used the new server manager console to add roles. Microsoft seems to be continuing with this focus on the details for Windows 7, without any of the over-ambitious change-everything type of features that plagued Vista’s development and launch. Will it be enough to change perceptions? I know a lot of people who have started making moves towards Linux or Mac in the last couple of years, where incidentally, we also do a pretty good job with copying files.
June 5th, 2009 a.t 8:31 am
cracking good story! - regards m8te! =)