I hate Windows.

Post #307,103 by Another Scott 4/10/09 7:41:36 AM Reply	I hate Windows. So, I've been using my T61 running XP to copy backup data to new drives and then cloning them. I've got a USB/SATA "dock" interface, and a USB/SATA/IDE mulit-connector interface thingy. I'm using Seagate and Hitachi 1 TB SATA drives. Everything seems to go reasonably well, I'm getting about 25 MB/s transfer rates according to FileCommander, until I try to copy a 75 GB file created by TerraByte's ImageforWindows. (It's some sort of proprietary archive.) It'll start copying, but since it's so huge and takes so long, eventually Windows pops up a message saying that it's "Out of Resources" with a bunch of other gibberish. I tried it about 6 times before I finally got it to complete. I thought it might be related to the Seagate drive spinning down (as a power saving "feature") after some period of inactivity while FC figures out how big the file is. But that doesn't seem to be the problem. What finally seemed to work was to turn off GoogleDesktop. I don't know what the interaction was, (even if it was trying to index it (which I don't think it does to *.tbi files) I don't think it should matter) but it was annoying. Oh, and some of the files I've been backing up were created by a colleague who likes to use really-long-file-names-with-lots-of-descriptive-information-including-specifics-that-are-in-the-file in really-long-subdirectory-names-with-lots-of-descriptive-information-including-specifics-that-are-in-the-file. Guess what? Windows doesn't like that if the backups are a couple of subdirectories deeper than the original file. I hate Windows. Cheers, Scott. (Who thought that Resource limitations were resolved about 10 years ago, and who thinks that an OS should be able to copy a file without it taking 6 attempts no matter how big the file is, and who thinks that if an OS allows long filenames and long directory names then the OS should have a mechanism for dealing with such things being deeper in the tree without simply failing (like the ~1 stuff Winders uses for LFN on FAT), and who needs to talk to his colleague about his filenaming conventions...)
Post #307,107 by static 4/10/09 8:58:16 AM Reply	Long path names and Windows. Windows has some odd limitations when it comes to file and pathnames. Most of them are API limitations (as in, the limit is part of the documented API call), not OS limitations. Some of them go back to Windows 3, perhaps even DOS 2! One I particularly remember: Pathnames have a limit of 254 characters. Not absolute pathnames: just a pathname. You can be in a current directory whose absolute pathname is 160 characters and you can successfully open a file using a relative path that is also 160 characters! In fact, I think a "current directory" can actually be much longer than 254 characters, but you can't change directly into it (obviously) and Windows does get a little funky displaying such a path. Explorer does not have the smarts to take advantage of this. Also, there are similar limitations in the SMB protocol, too. I doubt you're hitting that in your case, but I've seen it in several un-related scenarios, both onto Window servers and onto Linux servers. Adding UCS2 encoding, which is what a lot of NT3 API calls want, makes all this a whole lot more complicated. Sometimes the limit is 254 characters, sometimes it is 254 bytes. Wade. "Ah -- I take it the doorbell doesn't work?"
Post #307,179 by jb4 4/11/09 11:17:13 PM Reply	Re: Long path names and Windows. My understanding of the limits are: 1) The buffer for the pathname you're trying to access is 255 characters ling (remember everything is C-ish, so that extra character slot is for the terminating '0'), so static is right in that there are 254 useful characters. If the path is relative, then you have an additional 254 characters of path name space available for the name. So go to the directory and back up those long filenames; if you start at C:, you're doomed. 2) Windows HTH (No, that 2nd one wasn't a typo...) Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends! (Disk crashes notwithstanding...) jb4
Post #307,593 by Ashton 4/20/09 5:15:53 PM Reply	So does this chap http://www.salon.com...source=newsletter Rant: Microsoft Windows Out of Box Experience Sucks OK, rant mode on. This morning I spent over three hours running Windows Update on the cool Viliv S5 UMPC I am evaluating. Yes, I realize it runs the older Windows XP operating system, but even so Microsoft must make the out of box experience (OOBE) better than this. I have recently experienced this process with Vista too, and itÂs no better than XP. ItÂs time that Microsoft fix this absolutely unbearable process. The entire Windows Update process resulted in 5 reboots and took almost 3.5 hours. That is ridiculous in and of itself, but watching it closely (something you have to do as it requires user input at inopportune moments) really got me steamed, as I realized that Microsoft could easily fix this stupid process. How can Microsoft make this more bearable for the end-user? Simple. Watching the update process made it clear that Microsoft supplied the OEM with Windows XP SP1. A large part of the update process was downloading and installing SP2, which has been out for years. The next pass of Windows Update then downloaded and installed SP3, which has also been out forever. Why the hell is Microsoft not supplying OEMs with the latest SP slipstreamed in the build image? My fury didnÂt end there, no siree. The update process also duly downloaded and installed .NET Framework 1.0. Then 1.1. Then 1.5. That is absolutely stupid on any level. Then came the core Microsoft applications that had to be Âupdated.Â You may not believe it, but the update process had to download and install Internet Explorer 7, yes, thatÂs right 7, which is not even the current version available. Windows XP is still shipping with IE6 in the OEM image. Incredible. [. . .] OTOH, when I put the hP nb on hi-speed for update, before shipping it off to its new home across the continent: surprisingly (atop my previous clean install w/ BugFixes 1 & 2) -- it seems I was spared the 100+ bug-at-a-time process via Bug-fix 3. Thus my sole experience with Beast Update was 100% OK. [Hah..] (And yes, I did apologize to new owner re what she shall henceforth have to do, regularly ... for even a 50% chance of maybe getting some work done; oblig. reminder about how easily Ubuntu could save her from several dozen hours of uncertainty each month ... and that constant Beastware companion: The Fear.)

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