Carole

This stupid Windows 7 can’t even stamp the correct date and time on a photo when I save it from Photoshop. And it’s because of this phucking piece of shet called “Libraries”. How the phuck do I turn this koksukker off???

Take your column and shove it up your erse, a$$hole

I’m really pleased that Bill responded before me, because while I think I understand what you want, I have NO idea where you might be able to get it. I’d be interested to hear what you think of fences.

Cheers

Jim

But, I have a (somewhat) related question for you – do you know if it is possible to do the similar organizational things with open documents? For example, I am now a PhD student, and often I will be working on writing a paper – which involves having several pdfs, word processors, spreadsheets, and internet browser windows open at once, all relevant to that specific project. But then I may get tired of working on that project, and I decide to work on a different project also requiring multiple documents and browser windows open. It is really a pain to open all of those documents and sites each time I need them – and I had 2 ideas of ways to improve productivity:

My initial idea was to have 2 separate desktops, or workspaces, that I could switch between, so that when Windows stacks all of the Adobe Reader windows on top of each other, I don’t have to sort out manually which belong to project A or project B.

The second idea was to be able to simultaneously save several documents of different file types at once, and to be able to link them somehow so that they all open together. For instance, some referencing software can be made to open simultaneously whenever you open your word processor – so it would be similar to that but specific to those files, web sites, etc.

If this doesn’t sound crazy, and actually exists, could you point me in the direction of finding out how to do that? Alternatively … is there actually a way to tell Microsoft what they should be incorporating into the next version of Windows??

Libraries (while potentially useful) certainly muddy the water on a 1.5TB hard disk. If you think you will run into hard disk problems, buy a bigger hard disk in the first place. File systems were invented to keep your files exactly where you put them. If you loose them, excellent search functions were written. These ‘ghost’ folders are not a good idea. It’s not hard code to write, and the idea isn’t that new. The more I learn about computers, the more I realize the first few programmers were brilliant. They had no use for voodoo file systems, and to this day we are still using their basic layouts. This is because it’s so standardized and simple. Libraries break every file system rule I can think of.

1. Is the file where you put it? no.
2. Is the file where it says it is? no.
3. Is the file easier to find? not really.

Thanks so much.

It’s great to know that what I called tracking works at least internally. (If “internal” includes networked hard disks, so much the better.)

Where it doesn’t work, I think I should change my comment from “not only useless but quite dangerous” to “useful but dangerous.” If one experiments thoroughly and understand the dangers, nothing to keep one from taking advantage of the feature within its current limits.

Thanks again.

I’m not at all sure about the dragging. I never drag anything.

Great questions. I haven’t stopped responding. Just busy.

1. Certainly with an internal drive that works just fine. With a USB key it tells me I cannot add it to the library in the first place. With an external hard drive… that fails. It insists that the original folder is simply unavailable.

2. Same deal as 1 above. internal is fine. External has issues.

3. I’m not going to try, but I wouldn’t expect that to work.

I can understand why you might be concerned, but I’m not convinced these are big issues to most users.

Hope that helps.

Jim

Does anyone have answers to these questions? (Thanks in advance.)

1. Does the library track a folder though name changes? I.e., if a folder named “ABC” goes into a library and later renamed “XYZ” will that library continue to contain that folder? (I don’t see how that could happen if the name change happens while the storage medium is not connected to the OS, e.g. if it is an external device and the change occurs while connected to another computer.)

2. Does the library track a folder through location changes. I.e. if I move a component folder to another location of the folder hierarachy, will the library follow it to the new location? (Ditto on disconnected media.)

3. Does the library survive switching a hard drive, i.e. where you copy the entire contents of disk A to B, remove A, and install B?

Unless the library can do 1 and 2, I think it would be not only useless but quite dangerous. I may have a folder called 123 within folder A, which I move into folder B. Then I create a new folder called 123 within A. I now access “123″ through the library with the intention of accessing the old 123, but did the library track the location change? Particularly if the new and the old 123 contained similar files, I may not notice where I’ve ended up.

I greatly appreciate your article!

Without that level of control, picassa or similar ends up being a lot more useful.

This request is not a trite as it seems as it is basically a legacy of Windows versions over the years and now we have been lead into a quite silly spot as an accident of Microsoft’s changed thinmiking. In the early days many of us figured out we needed to organise files as this could obviously become a problem in time. For me (and many) we made a Working Files directory (of whatever name we fancied, mine was “files”. This was then subdivided into whatever we liked, I did it by software type then typically work / home and subdivided as such. As time went on this organisation was extremely helpful, otherwise the default was typically to store the working files in a folder in the programmes’ directory.

So some of us had working files fairly organised when My Documents came along. After stubbornly refusing to put all our files into one place various haphazard means then occurred to deal with what were really documents, and what were other stuff. Of course we had the ratcheting of control to a user level and some of the ridiculous places that caused files to be put (and still does).

Obviously Microsoft is now slowly unjumbling the mess they have accidentally created, but there is enormous reluctance to make it easy for users to see how to gain control over this again in a way that a basically organised person can be happy with, which is the essence of the complaints earlier in this thread!

The other thing I am trying to fix is this deliberate jumping to the bottom of the screen that occurs when opening a folder in the left explorer pane. It might be a designed in feature but I fail to see how it is helpful. Jumping to the top of the screen I could understand. Any clues there, or is it too far off topic?

Do you know what would happen if using libraries, and playing a song from a remote computer, a user on the other computer tries to play the same song? This may be more networking than libraries.

patrick