Can anyone shed any light on why the time estimates in file copying dialog boxes in Microsoft Windows are so ridiculously inaccurate? Is this a difficult problem to solve? I know BeOS handled it remarkably well. What about other operating systems? Mac OS (classic or X), the linux GUIs, etc?
9 thoughts on “8 Minutes Remaining. No, wait! Make that 52 mintutes”
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I’ve always thought that estimated time left was based on the current demand on system resources of your computer (same goes for downloading). It will take 8 minutes to copy but then another process starts running in the background and now it will take 52 minutes because your sharing resources.
ex: I’m downloading a file and it estimates 10 minutes. If I start browsing sites with large downloads that time could increase to 20 minutes as I’m now sharing bandwith.
It’s one of the mysteries of life.
It can be a difficult problem to solve well for all cases, however the Windows implementation seems to be poor in most cases.
This always struck me as an issue that Bill Gates would run into someday when backing up photos of his new house, call a chief engineer, and shit all over him until it worked.
But how are you so sure that Bill Gates uses a Windows computer? 🙂
(Ok, just in case someone would want to flame me for that, I typed too fast, and didn’t mean “a Windows computer” as in “a Windows computer”, but rather “he uses Windows, or a computer at all” and my fingers went too fast and pardon my French.)
AFIAK, Windows takes the current transfer rate for the current file, and multiplies that by the amount of files remaining. It’s really quite primitive.
s/afiak/afaik/
My apologies.
Yeah Levi, that seams right. When you’re copying a large group of files, the time will swing wildly when zipping through small files vs. working through large files.
I would have thought that the better idea would be to calculate the total size of the infomation you were copying and calculate a ETA based on that. I suspect MS doesn’t do this — witness that you could ask it to copy a folder w/ 500 files from location A to location B, but 367 files into the request it tells you location B is full. In fact, I guess internally, the process is still that each file is moved as a individual unit. I guess to illustrate what I have just poorly explained, find someone who still has Windows 95 (w/out IE 4.0 installed). When you copy a bunch of files or a folder in that OS, the progress bar would show the progress of each individual file and reset to zero before the next file.