OT : An open letter to MS

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lloyd Sheen
  • Start date Start date
L

Lloyd Sheen

Please , please , please take a large magnet and put it close to the disks
that hold the source code for Vista. Hold it there for as long as it take
to destroy it.

I am now waiting for a simple search to occur. I am in the process of
culling files that were created during a file cleanup operation. For each
file there is a .bak file created.

I go to Windows Explorer, select the top level folder in which the cleanup
has taken place. Type *.bak into the search window. 20 mins later it has a
list (but the cursor show a waiting). I select all the items displayed and
Shift-Delete, 3 more minutes and it asks me if I want to permanently delete
them. I answer yes and 2 more minutes pass before the dialog showing the
deletion.

OK. Now I open a command window, go to the folder and type dir *.bak /S.
In about 5 seconds I get a list of another 50 items. Gee I wonder where
they were hiding when Explorer looked for them?? I reopen explorer and do
the search again. This time very quickly (relatively speaking) I see a
list. Hey it is the same list (ASP people does this seem like a cache?).
Let try to delete one. Hey its not there.

What use is a search which finds items that do not exist??

How can anyone justify a search taking 20 mins?? Especially when good old
DOS takes 5 seconds.

Oh and when you attempt the delete you might think the list would get rid of
the ones it did delete. Of course not.

THIS IS THE NORM FOR VISTA. MS SUCH A POOR JOB. I FEEL SORRY FOR ALL
THOSE LIKE MYSELF WHO HAVE TO USE THIS ..... fill in the blank.

Sorry to those who are not from MS. It would be nice if someone who does
monitor this newsgroup from MS could lead me to someone there who cares.

Lloyd Sheen
 
What use is a search which finds items that do not exist??
Click to expand...
Worse still, try searching your VB project file folders for files
containing a word that you know to be there. Vista won't find it!
 
Cor Ligthert said:
Lloyd,

Microsoft is a large organisation, the change that this message in its
context reaches those you want to address to is little.

You can try this one, as if this is made for it.
http://connect.microsoft.com/

Cor
Click to expand...

Cor,
I know nothing will come of this. I have just about given up on Connect
as useful as well. I have submitted many times to Connect and most of the
time the postings just sit there. The ones that are replied to are always ,
"This is by design".

Thanks
LS
 
Clive Lumb said:
Worse still, try searching your VB project file folders for files
containing a word that you know to be there. Vista won't find it!
Click to expand...

Clive,
Not wanting to let this defeat me I did some more tries. I found that
the virus that was causing this behaviour.

Windows Search Indexer.

I disabled it and voila the problem of explorer not knowing what existed
and what didn't disappeared. It seems that my comment about a "cache" was
correct. With the service disabled it would now actually search the file
system and the number of finds matched what DOS would do.

I only enabled Search to so what you pointed out. In Search (at least
in Vista) there is a dialog that will allow you to allow it to index .vb
files as text. This allowed me to search my test solution in which I have
many samples of how to use parts of the framework. If you are not using
Vista you have to put a registry entry into the .vb file to have the search
indexer to search within the files.

I am not sure whether this capabiltity overweighs the problems with
Search Indexer, so for now it remains disabled.

Thanks
LS
 
dhstein said:
what about doing del *.bak /s from a command window - just be careful
Click to expand...

I wrote my own utility. It takes a starting folder, does a search using
My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles, a listview and a button. Took less time to
create than the original search. I also disabled Windows Search Indexer
which seemed to be causing most of the problems.

Thanks
LS
 
Lloyd said:
I wrote my own utility. It takes a starting folder, does a search using
My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles, a listview and a button. Took less
time to create than the original search. I also disabled Windows Search
Indexer which seemed to be causing most of the problems.
Click to expand...

Funny, I did just about the same when looking for some old code... I
gave up using the Vista search when it failed because it filled the
entire C drive by unpacking every zip on the disk I was searching into
my temp folder...
 
Lloyd said:
Not wanting to let this defeat me I did some more tries. I found
that the virus that was causing this behaviour.
Windows Search Indexer.
Click to expand...

If you want to perform powerful searches on filenames and file content,
I personally ignore the built in search facility (and switch off the
indexer so it doesn't reduce my system performance) and use a third
party application.

Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/) is free and
brilliant. It has fantastic facilities for file searching and will
integrate into the shell so you can right-click a folder to search. The
professional version, FileLocator Pro, is excellent too (though not free).
 
(O)enone said:
If you want to perform powerful searches on filenames and file content, I
personally ignore the built in search facility (and switch off the indexer
so it doesn't reduce my system performance) and use a third party
application.

Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/) is free and
brilliant. It has fantastic facilities for file searching and will
integrate into the shell so you can right-click a folder to search. The
professional version, FileLocator Pro, is excellent too (though not free).
Click to expand...
Will it index Outlook messages too?
 
You don't need indexing when you have decent
search. I can find any text, in any file on a drive,
quickly on Win98. There's no indexing; just basic search.
On XP it wants to index, it requires categorizing
by file extension, and it's absurdly slow. (Isn't that
what indexing was supposed to prevent?) I also
found that Agent Ransack was a very good
replacement. I wouldn't even think of using XP
search anymore. It's ironic that Microsoft wants to
beat Google for Web search when they can't even
make basic Windows search work properly.
 
It's ironic that Microsoft wants to beat Google
for Web search when they can't even make
basic Windows search work properly.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Vista Search is dreadful. Painfully slow and not at all intuative.
It's bad enough for experienced IT people to use and it must be almost
impossible for ordinary Joe Public. Mind you, Vista itself runs like a pig
in treacle! Dreadful piece of rubbish!

Mike
 
Will it index Outlook messages too?
Click to expand...

It doesn't index anything, it just searches. I doubt it'll do anything
useful with Outlook messages; if it can find the text you supply, it'll
only tell you which of Outlook's raw files the text is stored in, not
which message.

Personally if I want to search for a message within my mail client, I
get my mail client to find it for me. If that's not the way you want to
work then perhaps something other than Agent Ransack will be required.
 
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