Windows 95, Windows XP and Windows 7 are operating systems that have offered an incredible service to millions of usersbut like in everything, nothing is perfect.
Over time, Microsoft has evolved in various aspects and has solved most of the problems reported in new versions, such as Windows 10 and Windows 11, which are the most recent.
However, there are a specific failure that has been difficult to overcome regardless of the type of operating system and is the estimated time to copy the files.
This window that appears with calculations of the minutes or hours it lasts a data transfer has never been accurate and it has become somewhat annoying for many. Given this doubt, a former Windows engineer has explained how this process works and why the error occurs.
The estimated Windows file transfer time is not accurate because the Shell does not allow it
Montaje/Freepik
Dave W Plummer, an expert who worked on Windows until 2003explained that he was working on the Task Manager and the file transfer progress bar.
Due to the numerous complaints that have been generated for years about the progress of this functionality, it has decided to share the reason why this happens in a video on its official YouTube channel.
Highlighting that one of the biggest problems with Windows XP was that it sometimes gave absurd waiting times such as “39 years to copy 180 MB”, he explains that everything revolves around how the Windows shell works.
The estimated times are erratic because goes through a series of recent or real-time processesas it does not have the ability to know with a full analysis of the disk’s bandwidth or storage space, nor the size of the next files it records.
This is due to all the complex operations that occur when copying or moving elementssuch as disk saturation, cache and many other things that do not make prediction possible. For that reason, it records only what is happening at the moment.
To explain it in a simpler way, Plummer gives the example of going from one place to another on public transportation. Along the way, time estimates change because there are other people getting on the vehicle at stops, there are traffic lights or possible problems with the bus.
Just as Windows does, it cannot give you exactly the time in which a copy will be finished, since analyzes files second by second and that’s why it changes.
Definitely, it is one of the unknowns of the operating system that have already been resolved. In the end It is not an error as suchbut the way the shell can work.
Operating systems now have a better process bar and better prediction, but perhaps in the future this data will be more accurate.
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Tags: Microsoft, Windows 7