Windows 8 to Have Improved Transfer Dialogs

I haven’t been thrilled about all that’s been floating around about Windows 8, but with its development blog launched about two weeks ago, Microsoft has been unveiling more good than bad. Its latest announced improvement? A much-needed overhaul of the file transfer dialogs, to improve both control and performance.

Microsoft admits that a big issue with previous implementations of the file transfer dialog has been with large transfers, either in size or in number of files. Often, the company found that many people who transfered large data quantities would either encounter an error, or end up canceling the process. With this in mind, Microsoft wanted to consolidate multiple dialog boxes into one, be more clear, and offer more control.

Have you ever had to juggle more than one file copy dialog at once? In Windows 8, that will be no more, as when a second and subsequent transfers are kicked off, all transfers will be confined to a single window. Here, there is no estimated time to completion, but rather just the progress bar. Clicking on “More Details” expands the entire dialog to give a lot more information, including actual performance.

If file conflicts are discovered, the newer dialog boxes will give a bit more information than before, and in the case of photos, small thumbnails will be displayed (though I’d argue that the thumbnails are far too small for seeing minor differences between two similar photos). Lastly, another simple but important addition is the ability to pause individual transfers. This is useful if many transfers are occurring at once, but one is more time-sensitive than the others.

Overall, the improvements to the dialog boxes in Windows 8 are rather simple overall, but major in the grand scheme, as anyone who has ever copied lots of data in Windows should be able to attest.