Bogus Download/Copy Times to be Removed in Windows 8

Have you ever watched the blue bar crawl during a download and seen it say, “10 minutes, no, 20 minutes, no, an hour 20 minutes?” Yeah, it is a joke! But, Windows 8 may “fix” this, by removing it! Yep! Now, it will just tell you download speed, and size… makes sense!

Microsoft unveils file-move changes in Windows 8

“Microsoft has been throwing out crumbs on forthcoming features for Windows 8, but dodged serving up the main course.

Windows 8 will clean up the system for downloading files to your PC and changing file names, Microsoft has said on its newly launched Building Windows 8 blog.

The successor to Windows 7 will combine file download dialogue boxes into a single box, you’ll be able to stop and pause downloads, and rather than trying to estimate how long a download has left to run, the new operating system will instead feature a graph that shows the data transfer speed, transfer rate trend, and how much data is left to transfer.

Discussing the file changes in a video on the Windows 8 blog here – a video that doesn’t work in Firefox – Microsoft acknowledged Windows’ downloads estimates are something of a joke.

When it comes to re-naming files, Windows users get a dialogue box with thumbnails of files where there is a naming clash – and a check box next to each thumbnail which you can tick to show which files you want to keep.

In keeping with recently established Windows engineering team tradition, Microsoft has justified the changes by quoting telemetry data gathered on Windows PC users’ habits.

According to that data, copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files are ‘far and away the most heavily used features within Windows Explorer’ and account for half of all commands.”