Case Study 2 - Windows page 5

Part of the file system viewers case study.

Apparently, I have 746 items in the Recycle bin:

Nope, apparently it’s empty:

Nope, 746 items … Empty. 746 items … empty. What is it doing? (Yes this is still the same window)

Just going around and around, arguing with itself whether my Recycle Bin is empty or full without actually showing me anything. The screenshot below is after closing the Recycle Bin window after another bout of the same problem, but when I closed the window, Explorer thought that the Recycle Bin was empty, and now it has stuck that way:

The following situation occurred while changing the sort order of a Windows Explorer search while it was still in progress:

Yep, apart from those two fragments, all my files disappeared. They did return when the search completed, however.

Finally, another case of its infamous gibberish:

This happens occasionally when moving files off my camera via USB mass storage. What on Earth an “inpage operation” and why is there no “Retry” button?

Also, once you unmount the camera, drive F disappears. I don’t know how Explorer’s history works, but an unmounted drive no longer registers in the history:

Explorer also has a strange changeover point with its unit suffixes, resulting in the following dialog box:

It took me aback until I realised that both files were in fact of the same size.

The following Properties dialog is for a file on a Windows share hosted by my Macintosh running the DAVE SMB client. Both machines are using 32-bit file systems, so I don’t know how to explain away the enormous internal fragmentation suggested:

I have mixed views on the multi-layered Shell Document View model of Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. In many ways, it’s a brilliant system, but I do have to wonder: if I use address bar autocompletion to select a text file, why does it browse to it instead of launch it?

Windows Explorer also has a very bizarre idea of what constitutes The Internets:

Apparently, most of our home network is out on it.