So I’m deleting this really big folder from my USB hard drive, and I get the message from Windows:
which is odd, because I know there’s over 35,000 files totaling over 370 GB of data in that folder.
Ah, I see…
the count is growing. Fortunately, only 5 seconds remain.
A few minutes later, over a minute remains:
which slowly counts down to 5 seconds, which remains the estimate for the next 15 minutes:
I know I’ve ranted about Vista on more than one occasion. But this is ridiculous.
I understand that some operations may seem quick, and then turn out to be slow, foiling the accuracy of a progress bar. This is not the case, however. This progress bar is estimating time to completion without ever attempting to compute the actual size of the operation! The rate of file deletion is extremely consistent. If Vista had begun by counting the number of files in the total set, then an accurate estimate could have been presented.
Oh well. At least we have talking paperclips.