I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
Not 99%. Windows has many usability issues. I’d vote for “dont steal focus and stick windows in front of where I’m typing” and “don’t move things just as I go to click on them” for a start, and also “don’t somehow take an hour to delete 50 files.”
Shift-Del to delete files is usually much faster, though obviously this skips the recycle bin.
Moving files to the recycle bin and deleting files should take the same amount of time, both are essentially just a rewrite of the pointer to the data and don’t copy any data at all.
Not on Windows, it actually moves your files to a special directory.
I take it you don’t filesystem much do you?
Moving a file is literally just changing a pointer in the filesystem table to basically say ‘hey, these file contents are now stored in this other folder’. Moving a file on the same drive literally never requires rewriting the actual file contents.
I’m practically certain that what’s slowing Windows down when sending something to the Recycle Bin is the background processing and data compression being performed by System Restore.
I take it you don’t Windows much?
Windows moves the file from its current folder to the hidden system folder C:\$Recycle.Bin\. That involves copying file metadata, updating NTFS records, and possibly moving the file across volumes (which becomes a full file copy+delete).
Large files or folders with many entries take longer because NTFS has to record each move, update security descriptors, and maintain the Recycle Bin’s index.
If the file is on another drive than the C-drive, the system literally copies it into that drive’s recycle bin folder, then deletes the original.
Nobody said Windows did this stuff efficiently.
Windows doesn’t do any recycle bin data compression. And System Restore is a completely separate, unrelated system. So no it doesn’t do any of that.
“Fun” fact: if you think it’s slow normally (and to be fair, it is), NTFS seems to have a pathological performance regression when a directory contains more than 10,000 children, any operations on files in that directory slow down by around 95%.
I discovered this on our CCTV system at work (that runs on Windows Server 2022), which creates an inordinate number of small files (each containing at most a few seconds of video). It was causing some of its periodic maintenance tasks to fail, as they’d take longer to run than than the configured interval between them.
Windows also really doesn’t like dealing with half-petabyte filesystems, just like… at all.
I can also tell you that if you are working with file numbers in the 10,000, windows will notoriously interfere with their built-in services. When copying or moving, msdefender might delay every file copy because it marks the action as suspicious and begins scanning the files beforehand. And also the trkwrks or however that drive observation service is called may block actions on specific files just because.
In short, you are not only fighting drive formats at that point, you are also fighting your built-in system services. Source: I wanna die.
And yet they use that fs for their little winsxs trick with 10’000’s of child dirs.
NewTechnology File SystemIt’s new compared to FAT!
(of 1995)
Deleting files was an amazing one already. Then I recently discovered the joy of deleting 30k emails from Outlook… T-T
I literally cannot understand how Outlook is so awful and unpleasant to use. Constant pauses, regular freezes and a search that will show a document I sent to myself five years ago regardless of search terms but won’t surface the perfect match I received yesterday, in the world’s most prominent email client.
The only worse software I have to interact with on a daily basis is Adobe’s PDF reader, which gives me five popups within one minute of opening it and takes over a minute to do a text search in a five page document.
Years of hü and hott between different teams, with different goals, not knowing what the other teams did.
I typically use my browser for PDFs. Firefox actually has some basic PDF edit functionality now.
But better disable javascript use for pdfjs.
I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.
Try Robocopy. It’s built-in and allows using multiple threads.
That thinking is so very annoying. This is all time that could be used to copy files.
The best bit is that if you lose patience and cancel, the “Cancelling…” takes even longer than finishing the job would have done. I really have no idea what’s going on. Journalling file systems in Linux don’t have to do this.