Microsoft revamped the Copy Dialog box in Windows 8. You now get useful visualizations of the progress and speed of your file copy. You can also pause/resume individual copies if you're doing many in parallel. Microsoft also claims that file copies now properly resume if you put your system to sleep and wake it up later.

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  • dgingeri - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    This is nice and all, but did they finally fix the problem where running into a file that's in use causes a cancel and we have to start over? Better yet, if a file is in use, it skips the file and copies the rest while waiting for a response to the dialog box?
  • gdinero79 - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    Hasn't that been fixed since Vista? It doesn't automatically skip and keep going in the background but it definitely doesn't cancel the entire process.
  • hackztor - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    Last time I read that it would skip those files and put them last with the dialog box.
  • ksherman - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    I read that too. Windows 7 kinda does that, but it seemed to have a mixed track record.

    These are some nice little improvements. Heavily considering a move back to Windows from OS X. Lion and Mountain Lion have shifted away from a getting-things-done OS and are catering to a different customer. I've always like Windows 7 and am glad I have it on my desktop at home.
  • star-affinity - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    ”Lion and Mountain Lion have shifted away from a getting-things-done OS”

    Just curios – what makes you think that? I don't think the later versions of Mac OS X has lost anything, rather things have been added.

    Windows 8 seems nice and all (this copy feature seems like a good improvement) but I still find OS X to be a good OS with overall fewer steps to perform most tasks.
  • ericloewe - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    It's fixed in Windows 7 as far as I can tell: The operation *does* go on, but the prompt appears as soon as the error appears.
  • piroroadkill - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link

    Yes, it carries on the in the background in 8.

    But the problem you're talking about was fixed since Vista.
  • Pessimism - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    Why did this take Microsoft seventeen years to implement? This should have been in Windows 95. The worldwide collective quantity of hair pulling infuriation at Windows' terrible handling of basic copy, move and delete operations is.... significant.
  • apinkel - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    It does seem like an obvious thing... although I can't think of another major operating system's file manager that has a better implementation than what already exists in windows 7. I'd hope there's a good reason no-one has implemented this to-date.

    It might be because when doing file operations over a network the stats about the file operation just aren't available due to limitations of the network api. This is pure speculation though.
  • sprockkets - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link

    Not to be elitist, but KDE on Linux had the ability to not crap on one file not being able to be copied since like 2003 or earlier, plus reported the speed. KDE4 introduced some years ago start/stop file xfers. With DBUS on Gnome if you started other file xfers it would qeune them instead of trying to do all of them at once very slow due to how most traditional HDDs work.

    Of course KDE4 is an abomination.

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