Vista's "merge folders"

mtroxmtrox Minnesota
edited July 2007 in Science & Tech
I'm trying to live with Vista on one of my boxes as I assume I'll be supporting it more and more all the time. This is one of the many things that just bugs the H--l out of me.

Often I'll do some work on my XP laptop, then later be on my Vista box and just just pull the entire folder across my wireless network to the Vista machine. On previous versions of Windows I could just make the whole folder with all it's updated files overwrite the folder on the target computer. That way I knew I had the latest of everything without many steps.

Now with Vista I get this "Merge folders" dialogue box, and twice now it has brought over some new files, but deleted updated files in favor of the one that was there a few days ago. So I loose a day of work.

What the folks in Redmond are thinking here I don't have any clue. Anyone else bugged by this or am I missing something simple?

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2007
    Check to see if there are options on how merged folders works. It sounds like it's just doing a filename check and only copying over the differences. It's not a bad idea because what it's doing would save time in some situations. But what it should do is compare the dates and do a comparative over right. Soooo check to see if there is an option to enable something like that.

    Fortunately I've been able to avoid the VISTA bug long enough to have to worry about it's more annoying features.
  • deaden_07deaden_07
    edited July 2007
    I did not know about this 'feature'. Thanks for the warning.
  • mtroxmtrox Minnesota
    edited July 2007
    kryst I haven't seen any options or customization on this "feature". I Googled it, searched the Vista help files, no explanation. Cripes DOS 4.0 was smart enough to let you overwrite an entire folder. You'd think they could at least warn me when Vista is about to make decisions for me.
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited July 2007
    when I drag files over in Vists it always asks me if I want to copy and remove or copy and keep duplicate than on the right it gives me options to base the copy and remove on... date, time, file size etc... never had a merge option box?
  • mtroxmtrox Minnesota
    edited July 2007
    Yea I agree Sledge. I get it when I copy and paste an entire folder. I do that when I know that several files have changed on the other machine and I just want to know I have the latest of everything.
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited July 2007
    So is there a merge option box I haven't seen? or are we talking about the same thing?
  • mtroxmtrox Minnesota
    edited July 2007
    See the attached Sledge. You can see a window from my XP laptop, and one from my Vista box. If I try to copy the entire COsprings folder from XP to Vista, if I click "Yes" Vista makes a lot of decisions for me. If I click "No", nothing happens. You can see at the top of the dialogue box it says "folder replace", but that's not what it does.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2007
    I've done more digging on the net and they say that...

    Vista gave me a dialogue box asking me what do to, with options to keep only the old one, replace it with the new one, or rename one to eliminate the conflict...

    So not sure what's going on with yours
  • mtroxmtrox Minnesota
    edited July 2007
    I dunno. As I type this I'm setting up a Vista box for a client. I just don't have the patience to track down my own Vista problems. I've quickly learned you MUST turn off the User Account Control thing while you set one up. It will drive you nuts setting up one of these with that thing on. This one won't let me do an "ipconfig /release" for some reason. Probably UAC. Memorize ncpa.cpl cause that's the only way I see to get to your network connections (its gone in Control Panel now).

    Its just awful. 6 months into it and it's no better as far as I'm concerned. Its just hard to get under the hood and work on it. And then Microsoft "helpfully" does a lot of thinking for you.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited July 2007
    I've been working with Vista personally and for work for about a year now. I've worked with it as my sole OS for 30 days for an article.. I've put it through its paces and given it more than ample opportunities to show me something great, and I still think Vista is a dumpy slart of an OS; an I4 with "VTEC" on the trunk.
  • deaden_07deaden_07
    edited July 2007
    Yeah, but the version of Solitaire it has is really nice!
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