A few Vista Beta 1 impressions

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: 91TTZ

Originally posted by: 91TTZ
Looks neat.

Microsoft's design team in Cupertino, CA did a great job with this.

I'm going to quote my own reply for truth.

Then use QFT biatch!! You've just wasted time typing that out, and now you've wasted my time calling you out on it. 😛

By the way, no one answered my question posted previously. For someone wanting to check out the beta without being invited, is the copy protected by a reg key or what?

 

[Platypus]

Hahaha they managed to steal everyone's GUI ideas like 5 years after they've already been out on other window managers.

Is it me or is that Gnome? 😛

 

[Siva]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog
It takes a brave (or foolish) man to run a beta 1 of a Microsoft OS.

I ran the whistler alpha back in the day.... that was fun 😛

 

[Viper GTS]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog
It takes a brave (or foolish) man to run a beta 1 of a Microsoft OS.

Nothing brave about it, I'll run it in Virtual PC, give it a gig of RAM, & it'll be perfectly happy & completely safe.

Viper GTS

 

[EyeMWing]

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: 91TTZ

Originally posted by: 91TTZ
Looks neat.

Microsoft's design team in Cupertino, CA did a great job with this.

I'm going to quote my own reply for truth.

Then use QFT biatch!! You've just wasted time typing that out, and now you've wasted my time calling you out on it. 😛

By the way, no one answered my question posted previously. For someone wanting to check out the beta without being invited, is the copy protected by a reg key or what?

It's got a reg key and authentication.

 

[Alex]

interesting... screenshots look nice, very mac-osx like tho... :roll:
i'd rather sit out the beta testing and try out an RC maybe when the time is right...

 

[everman]

Why does anyone care about screen shots anymore? You could do any of this a long time ago, without needing 1+gb of ram.
They really just need to make it a lot easier to customize the gui yourself.

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: eLiu

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: archcommus
Okay...let's start addressing the real issues here...not the GUI or RAM usage, but the organization, content, and usage of this OS. I'm reading NFS4's link, and this naming confusion and Virtual Folders confusion worries me. I'm big on organization and anything that tries to mess with that will be personally terminated by me. 😀 Basically, I understand the need for Virtual Folders. They help people who CAN'T organize. No matter where on the HDD they drop their crap, they can find all of it in a Virtual Folder. Okay, that's fine and dandy, but for people like myself, who already store all their documents in a smart location anyway, I better damn well be able to ignore Virtual Folders and not use them for anything. THUS, it makes me very mad that the Documents link, for example, in the Start Menu, opens up the VIRTUAL All Documents folder and not the TRUE Documents folder. Anyone else share this concern with me?

And finally, the author of that article says that this will have to do until MS finally drops drive-letter based organization. Can anyone clarify what this means? If he means we need a way of doing things where the physical location of a file doesn't matter, that worries me even more. All that's saying is "We need a system where people can put files wherever the hell they please and can still find them and not worry about organizing it."

This is like the same thing with Gmail. Google encourages you to not worry about organizing your emails because their search feature is so awesome. Well I'm not real keen on doing that. By doing that, you NEVER really have a good idea of how many emails or what kind of emails you're storing. You have no idea what you have. But, when you want to find it, you can. Pushing that way of thinking in an OS doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

I agree with almost all of that. To reply to your first paragraph specifically, it does concern me of the main link in the start menu taking you to the virtual folder, and the confusion ensues about which folder you're actually in. The great thing about it? This is a beta, so hopefully enough people will give feedback to fix this in the final release, or atleast present a better solution. Chances are, you will be able to customize the start menu fully like you can in XP, so I'm not too worried about this facet yet. It should be possible to remove that link entirely, and/or change it or replace it.

I don't like the idea of searching. I know where my sh!t is, and I can most certainly get there faster than windows can search 300GB of files.

Don't want or need fancy file interfaces, pretty GUIs, etc...just something that is stable, compatible with crap, and won't eat my system resources...

you really have no idea about the speed and power of searching do you? go download copernic desktop search, its free. its INSTANT!! its the future. digging through hd manually for media/document files should be rare, its tedious work for chumps.

Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

Filtering music by genres or ratings in the shell instead of in a media player (for those freaks who insist on doing everything in explorer 😉).
Finding music with a particular guest artist.
Finding documents with particular authors.
Finding documents with certain keywords within them.
Finding photos taken on a particular date.
etc

Those are examples of what a normal home user would use it for. Now just think of the mess that shared directories at work can become. Adding indexed searching of network shares is huge.

EDIT:
The nitty-gritty of it all is that once you start organizing your media/files one way, you're stuck with it unless you want to do a lot of copy/pasting and renaming. Searching and filtering by metadata will save you a lot of future headaches. You can keep your folder hierarchy in a way that makes sense to you, but still be able to find those media/files that won't quite fit in one folder or another, or really belong in 2 (or 200).

 

[Sunbird]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: eLiu

Originally posted by: blurredvision

Originally posted by: archcommus
Okay...let's start addressing the real issues here...not the GUI or RAM usage, but the organization, content, and usage of this OS. I'm reading NFS4's link, and this naming confusion and Virtual Folders confusion worries me. I'm big on organization and anything that tries to mess with that will be personally terminated by me. 😀 Basically, I understand the need for Virtual Folders. They help people who CAN'T organize. No matter where on the HDD they drop their crap, they can find all of it in a Virtual Folder. Okay, that's fine and dandy, but for people like myself, who already store all their documents in a smart location anyway, I better damn well be able to ignore Virtual Folders and not use them for anything. THUS, it makes me very mad that the Documents link, for example, in the Start Menu, opens up the VIRTUAL All Documents folder and not the TRUE Documents folder. Anyone else share this concern with me?

And finally, the author of that article says that this will have to do until MS finally drops drive-letter based organization. Can anyone clarify what this means? If he means we need a way of doing things where the physical location of a file doesn't matter, that worries me even more. All that's saying is "We need a system where people can put files wherever the hell they please and can still find them and not worry about organizing it."

This is like the same thing with Gmail. Google encourages you to not worry about organizing your emails because their search feature is so awesome. Well I'm not real keen on doing that. By doing that, you NEVER really have a good idea of how many emails or what kind of emails you're storing. You have no idea what you have. But, when you want to find it, you can. Pushing that way of thinking in an OS doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

I agree with almost all of that. To reply to your first paragraph specifically, it does concern me of the main link in the start menu taking you to the virtual folder, and the confusion ensues about which folder you're actually in. The great thing about it? This is a beta, so hopefully enough people will give feedback to fix this in the final release, or atleast present a better solution. Chances are, you will be able to customize the start menu fully like you can in XP, so I'm not too worried about this facet yet. It should be possible to remove that link entirely, and/or change it or replace it.

I don't like the idea of searching. I know where my sh!t is, and I can most certainly get there faster than windows can search 300GB of files.

Don't want or need fancy file interfaces, pretty GUIs, etc...just something that is stable, compatible with crap, and won't eat my system resources...

you really have no idea about the speed and power of searching do you? go download copernic desktop search, its free. its INSTANT!! its the future. digging through hd manually for media/document files should be rare, its tedious work for chumps.

Hey, everybody look at the dense chump...... his names 0roo0roo...... :roll:

Who is gonna be digging? We know where our sh!t is already, we keep that info in our superior brains.... 😀

 

[fbrdphreak]

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I completely agree with commus. For general file access, storage, organization: there's no way in hell I just let sh!t float around. Right now my lappy has a bunch of files on the desktop taking up half the screen, but that's just 'cuz I've been busy 😛 Everything else is pristinely organized. In gmail I've got like two dozen labels setup, with almost as many filters. Hopefully MS wasn't stupid enough to not include "legacy" settings :roll:

That said, a better integrated search into windows would be nice. I occasionally need to search for things and it would be nice to have a quality integrated solution.

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

Filtering music by genres or ratings in the shell instead of in a media player (for those freaks who insist on doing everything in explorer 😉).
Finding music with a particular guest artist.
Finding documents with particular authors.
Finding documents with certain keywords within them.
Finding photos taken on a particular date.
etc

Those are examples of what a normal home user would use it for. Now just think of the mess that shared directories at work can become. Adding indexed searching of network shares is huge.

EDIT:
The nitty-gritty of it all is that once you start organizing your media/files one way, you're stuck with it unless you want to do a lot of copy/pasting and renaming. Searching and filtering by metadata will save you a lot of future headaches. You can keep your folder hierarchy in a way that makes sense to you, but still be able to find those media/files that won't quite fit in one folder or another, or really belong in 2 (or 200).

That DOES make sense, and sounds useful, and I'd have no problem using it. Just as long as the traditional folder structure still exists, so I can always get a clear snapshot of the exact contents of my entire HDD.

That's why I wonder what people mean when they say WinFS will take away traditional folders entirely. Don't like the sound of that.

 

[Tab]

Will the setup mess with any linux partitions or anything of that nature? Does it automaticaly make it's own partition for itself and leave XP Pro alone?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

Filtering music by genres or ratings in the shell instead of in a media player (for those freaks who insist on doing everything in explorer 😉).
Finding music with a particular guest artist.
Finding documents with particular authors.
Finding documents with certain keywords within them.
Finding photos taken on a particular date.
etc

Those are examples of what a normal home user would use it for. Now just think of the mess that shared directories at work can become. Adding indexed searching of network shares is huge.

EDIT:
The nitty-gritty of it all is that once you start organizing your media/files one way, you're stuck with it unless you want to do a lot of copy/pasting and renaming. Searching and filtering by metadata will save you a lot of future headaches. You can keep your folder hierarchy in a way that makes sense to you, but still be able to find those media/files that won't quite fit in one folder or another, or really belong in 2 (or 200).

That DOES make sense, and sounds useful, and I'd have no problem using it. Just as long as the traditional folder structure still exists, so I can always get a clear snapshot of the exact contents of my entire HDD.

That's why I wonder what people mean when they say WinFS will take away traditional folders entirely. Don't like the sound of that.

Glad you see what I mean even if a couple other people who've posted since I posted didn't. 😛 The builtin virtual folders and their placement on the start menu are a little silly, and I think that's what most people have a beef with, hopefully they'll make some changes so it makes more sense.

BTW, Vista won't be using WinFS now or at release. Basically all this metadata is an extension of the metadata you already get with NTFS (hover your mouse over a Word doc in explorer, you'll see author, etc). WinFS will be offered as an add-on or SP in the future. I believe it will also be backported to XP (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't believe either filesystem will take away your folder hierarchy, although I do believe WinFS will do away with drive letters.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

Filtering music by genres or ratings in the shell instead of in a media player (for those freaks who insist on doing everything in explorer 😉).
Finding music with a particular guest artist.
Finding documents with particular authors.
Finding documents with certain keywords within them.
Finding photos taken on a particular date.
etc

Those are examples of what a normal home user would use it for. Now just think of the mess that shared directories at work can become. Adding indexed searching of network shares is huge.

EDIT:
The nitty-gritty of it all is that once you start organizing your media/files one way, you're stuck with it unless you want to do a lot of copy/pasting and renaming. Searching and filtering by metadata will save you a lot of future headaches. You can keep your folder hierarchy in a way that makes sense to you, but still be able to find those media/files that won't quite fit in one folder or another, or really belong in 2 (or 200).

yup. say i want all soccer pictures. i type soccer.. done!! even if they are in multiple folders. now this would take going and opening several explorer windows if i wanted to view them all at once in the multiple folders. why make work for yourself? do you not understand with the indexing these things do the search is basically instant? good example is itunes and its ability to search metadata/file names. if i want all versions of X song.. i dont have to remember X Y Z artists sang it, and hunt them down folder by folder. i type in the song name and all isntances pop up instantly. or with video files or whatever. simply takes decent naming of files instead of worrying over your file system. spotlight in osx is even more powerful, it searches within pdf's emails and documents etc. and of course folders still exist. folders have names too.. sorta useful in search

its like using only command line to copy files... why the f*ck would you want to do that when you can just drag and drop.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I won't be ignorant and deny that there are uses for it I have not utilized. But can you give me some examples?

Filtering music by genres or ratings in the shell instead of in a media player (for those freaks who insist on doing everything in explorer 😉).
Finding music with a particular guest artist.
Finding documents with particular authors.
Finding documents with certain keywords within them.
Finding photos taken on a particular date.
etc

Those are examples of what a normal home user would use it for. Now just think of the mess that shared directories at work can become. Adding indexed searching of network shares is huge.

EDIT:
The nitty-gritty of it all is that once you start organizing your media/files one way, you're stuck with it unless you want to do a lot of copy/pasting and renaming. Searching and filtering by metadata will save you a lot of future headaches. You can keep your folder hierarchy in a way that makes sense to you, but still be able to find those media/files that won't quite fit in one folder or another, or really belong in 2 (or 200).

yup. say i want all soccer pictures. i type soccer.. done!! even if they are in multiple folders. now this would take going and opening several explorer windows if i wanted to view them all at once in the multiple folders. why make work for yourself? do you not understand with the indexing these things do the search is basically instant? good example is itunes and its ability to search metadata/file names. if i want all versions of X song.. i dont have to remember X Y Z artists sang it, and hunt them down folder by folder. i type in the song name and all isntances pop up instantly. or with video files or whatever. simply takes decent naming of files instead of worrying over your file system. spotlight in osx is even more powerful, it searches within pdf's emails and documents etc.

its like using only command line to copy files... why the f*ck would you want to do that when you can just drag and drop.

I'd imagine they'll have a pdf plugin for search (if not builtin) since there's one for MSN Search.

 

[SLCentral]

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak

Originally posted by: werk

Originally posted by: archcommus
Uhh.................NO. That's really the only word I can think of in reply to your post.

Quite frankly, digging through folders to find stuff is only a pain for those who have no friggin' idea how to organize crap. If you take some time to put things in their place, it's really quite simple. I can get to any requested document of mine within four folder clicks, and if I want to shorten that, a shortcut will do nicely. I use the search feature maybe once a month to find a rare program-related file or something.

I HATE the idea of not knowing what's on my computer, and that's exactly what search-oriented environments promote. "Just go ahead and toss your crap wherever you want, it doesn't matter, you can always find it with a search!" Then, months later, you see you're using over 100 GB of space and can't even begin to imagine what you're filling all that up with. Pretty hard to figure out when your C: drive is a huge catastrophe.

For those who can't organize, use your search and your Virtual Folders, that's fine with me. For those who can, like myself, there better be options in place to do things normally.

And a final question for those who love the search: If you rely on it so much to find your stuff, how do you efficiently back up ANYTHING? Just Ghost your whole drive and not worry about it?

Even for highly organized people, a good metadata search is invaluable. I think you're (partly) missing the point.

I completely agree with commus. For general file access, storage, organization: there's no way in hell I just let sh!t float around. Right now my lappy has a bunch of files on the desktop taking up half the screen, but that's just 'cuz I've been busy 😛 Everything else is pristinely organized. In gmail I've got like two dozen labels setup, with almost as many filters. Hopefully MS wasn't stupid enough to not include "legacy" settings :roll:

That said, a better integrated search into windows would be nice. I occasionally need to search for things and it would be nice to have a quality integrated solution.

I was the same as you before I got OS X Tiger, which has desktop search built into the OS (which is a bit different then Google Desktop Search and the like). I still keep all my stuff VERY organized in folders, yet search is still very useful. Apple lets you use the Apple key plus spacebar to activate search, so being able to type Apple + Spacebar, and then entering in whatever I need takes all of 3 seconds; much faster then navigating through the Finder, or the Explorer in Windows case.

Metasearch should NOT replace organization. It's important, at least for now, to know what is on your computer. Maybe in the future the OS will be smart enough to do this itself, getting rid of the crap you don't need, but for now, it would just be dumb to not organize and use search instead. But, search is a great addition to organization, and it speeds up my daily workflow a LOT.

 

[yankeesfan]

My hard drive isn't detected. Perhaps my SATA controller isn't supported?

 

[ElFenix]

guess i found a bug

i have 3 internal hard drives and 1 external currently connected. the external is going to be swapped for the smallest internal soon, but i'm paranoid so i run parallel until i feel safe about it. anyway, i tell windows to install to the smallest internal, because it has the most space and will get wiped soon, so it doesn't matter if some beta version of windows is on it.

windows looks like its installing, then pops up some error dialog and can't finish.

so restart back to xp.

i open up explorer, and there is nothing new on the internal drive. after poking around a bit, it seems windows has installed itself to the external drive.

i wonder how i report it?

 

[oogabooga]

this may have been covered : but is there a convert to classic look? I know the XP one isn't true win2k (though you can try really hard to make it such), does it have a convert to 2000 option?

 

[imported_mitch2891]

Does anyone know of a good article explaining WinFS?
All this talk of it has finally got me interested

 

[archcommus]

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one here who still thinks the folder structure should stay organized. Again, even if for the sole reason of being able to get an overview of the entire contents of the drive.

But I do see the usefulness for these kinds of instananeous searches. But I have a question. With the exception of the speed and the ability to search WITHIN documents, what other advantages do these advanced searches offer over current searching in XP? I mean, with the soccer example, I could just as easily type "soccer" in XP's search, and get the same results as the oh so beautiful Spotlight in OS X.

And finally, as mitch mentioned, let's get how WinFS functions cleared up here. Does it or does it not rely on the folder structure for ANYTHING.

 

[SLCentral]

Originally posted by: archcommus
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one here who still thinks the folder structure should stay organized. Again, even if for the sole reason of being able to get an overview of the entire contents of the drive.

But I do see the usefulness for these kinds of instananeous searches. But I have a question. With the exception of the speed and the ability to search WITHIN documents, what other advantages do these advanced searches offer over current searching in XP? I mean, with the soccer example, I could just as easily type "soccer" in XP's search, and get the same results as the oh so beautiful Spotlight in OS X.

And finally, as mitch mentioned, let's get how WinFS functions cleared up here. Does it or does it not rely on the folder structure for ANYTHING.

Well, first off, Spotlight in OS X (as well as the future Windows Vista search) is instantaneous. Meaning as you type, you're getting results. I search my 3/4 full 80GB HD in about 2 seconds flat. It also checks the metadata. For example, if you have a movie trailer that, in it's meta data, has some reference to Pixar. If you search Pixar, even if the movie title has nothing related to Pixar in it (such as, Toy Story), it will come up anyways, because Pixar was in the metadata. It's VERY powerful.