Copy and Move Files Faster and Smarter in Windows

Have you ever been frustrated copying or moving files in Windows? It seems to take forever and seems to slow the system down to a crawl. Sometimes you want to pause the copying or moving of files but in Windows your only option is to cancel the copy and the result is only a partial copy of the files and without taking the time to look through the files or folder, there’s no simple way of determining how far the copy got. Or maybe you’re copying off a dying drive and the system consistently fails on multiple files while copying.  Well there’s a simple program that overcomes the limitations of the Windows default file copy/move. The program is called TeraCopy by Code Sector. The link to the program is below.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Just download and install the program. There’s one option that you should be aware of during the installation. You will be prompted if you would like to “Use TeraCopy as the default copy handler”. If you would still like to keep the Windows copy / move feature, I would suggest against selecting this option. This is especially so to make sure that there is no incompatibilities with other programs you may have installed in your system.

So here’s a quick guide on how to copy/ move files. In this example, I will be moving a 1.79GB folder to a completely different hard drive. The process is the same for copying files

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How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista

Hardware Canucks has a great article on How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista.

Quote:

Well one of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Vista has been file sharing related. I’m on a secure (read: wireless w/ lead paint in the walls) home network, so when I share a folder, I just want everyone to be able to access it from any PC in the house. It’s that simple, or so it seems.

Vista makes sharing folders a pain. When you click share on a normal folder (right click, then “share”), you have to add the “Everyone” permission to that folder in order for anyone to be able to access it. I wonder why Vista would assume that when you share a folder you don’t want anyone to be able to access it except yourself…. from the machine on which it’s shared….. I’ve actually tried created an account with identical sign-in credentials to the Vista machine and it will not allow it to access files that have my own name as the “Owner” with full permissions….

Anyway, after some struggling I figured out how to share folders. Here’s problem #2 though. I use a full drive as my “My Documents” folder. Basically it’s a RAID-1 with anything that I could possibly value stored on it. That way I don’t have to waste space on my RAID with my Vista install/programs etc by mirroring my main drive and storing everything in default directories. So that means in order to share all of my “My Documents” stuff over the network (music, movies, etc), I need to share the root of a drive.

Vista will allow the permissions to be set, even though you have to do it manually by right clicking, then hitting “share”, and manually setting the permissions to everyone, but then when you try to access it from a remote computer, it will say “access is denied”. So I struggled with this for a bit, and finally I decided to dig deeper. Here’s how to share the root of a drive under Vista:

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