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General discussion

Vista Recycle Bin Less Informative Than XP

Jul 3, 2010 6:21PM PDT

Yes, Vista has been out for a long time, but I'm not just noticing this now; it's only taken me this long to get around to asking about it. In XP, and other Windows before, the RB (Recycle Bin) display showed only the recycle bin contents--which could be ordered in a number of different ways--but it also showed what you would see if you selected Properties on any other folder or file, THAT IS...the number of folders, files, and bytes. So, when files are deleted one could see the number of bytes that have actually been deleted.

The RB under Vista, in addition to showing a handful of other folders I don't care about at the moment, displays the actual RB folder but no volume data. Looking at "Properties" for the RB yields several numbers I don't care about (perhaps I should?).

Where did the stats go?

Discussion is locked

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There was an explaination given for that.
Jul 3, 2010 9:02PM PDT

Let me shorten up a long paper about this. I make no apologies about that or for this OS's designer.

In the design of Vista and 7 it was decided that computer users were put off by displays that came up and the lists of file names went whizzing by. In fact, it's a common Hollywood scene where bad things are happening when computer screens do that.

A decision was made to not show file names as they were copied.
The same for reducing information given in other areas.

All this was intentional. You are not alone in noticing it.

If you want to ask why, the answers are simple. It's a change to make the OS more acceptable to non-technical people. If you present 10 items of information, you get to explain 10 items during a tech support call. If you reduce this to just 2 items then it may avoid the call altogether.

Bob

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As I Feared
Jul 4, 2010 5:44AM PDT

Thanks Bob,

I was hoping for an answer along the lines of "...****** up the DWord in the Registry at...." On my home world, before we learned to speak, we were taught the hitherto, clay jar entombed, mysteries: op codes, multiple three-byte hex addresses, hypnotic trances induced by mag tapes undulating in their vacuum chambers, all-nighters spent hunched over a "core dump" praying for one more finger to keep place of a memory location that just might hold the secret to the unified field theory (or, you could simply hand the dump over to Jerry in "Software" who promises to get it back to you in a week--or so--maybe).