The World According to Mitch

Windows 8 has a ton of small changes that are making my life easier.  From time to time I find myself copying lots of files from one place to another; not as often mind you as when I was a partition fan, but it still happens.  One of the new features I am happy with in Windows 8 is the consolidation of copy progress windows into one.

In the example I have taken here, I am copying files from two different USB keys onto my local hard drive; last week, you see, I decided to re-image my laptop, and before I applied the image I copied all of my files onto the USB keys I had handy; I had the option, of course, to apply the image without wiping my partition, but decided to not do that.  I wiped it all out, and before I did I copied the files to… well, wherever I had sufficient space!

As we see here both move actions are going on simultaneously, and that is not new – you could do that easily in previous versions.  However in this ‘copy/move progress’ window we see four thing that are new to Windows 8:

1) We see the actual speed of the move, not just the progress bar.  This is expressed both as a historical graph and as an exact (current) text expression.

2) We have the source and destination clearly defined.  This is not necessarily new; what is new about it is that they are both live links, and if you click on one or the other you will open the source or destingation.

3) As stated earlier, both (or all) copies are in a single window, consolidating my visibility.

4) I have the ability to either pause or cancel my copy; in other words, if I have two copies running, and I have another that I need to start which has a higher priority, I can simply pause my running ones until the high priority copy is done, then resume the others.

Obviously these improvements are not enough to make me upgrade from Windows 7; there are tons of features in Windows 8 that did already.  What they will do however is make my Windows 8 experience better, and that is good enough for me!