I hate Vista's Windows Explorer! [help required]

You actually can select more than one file that way (if no icon is selected initially and you move the mouse quickly after clicking) but the only real solution is by switching from the vista theme to windows classic or standard.  After the switch, you won't get that blue halo around icons any more and you'll be able to select just as it was in xp and previous windows versions.

Unless you can find a way to get rid of that blue icon halo some other way (without disabling the vista theme) the way I described is the only one I know of.

Oh, and...

disable UAC - it's unnecessary if you know what you're doing.

jtrot4000 wrote:

disable UAC - it's unnecessary if you know what you're doing.

As is anti-virus and a firewall. That doesn't mean that disabling it is a wise choice.

evildictaitor wrote:

When you open an executable file, the process manager has to load the entire program out of memory before it can execute it, which for 700 megs can be a reasonable amount of time, but is still less than a second.

That is not true. The executable is memory mapped into the address space of the newly created process. It is then demand-loaded by page faults triggered in the virtual memory manager when the memory-mapped addresses are accessed. It is not loaded into memory in advance.

A lot of the delay in UAC is from the digital signature check it does.

Sven Groot wrote:



evildictaitor wrote: When you open an executable file, the process manager has to load the entire program out of memory before it can execute it, which for 700 megs can be a reasonable amount of time, but is still less than a second.

That is not true. The executable is memory mapped into the address space of the newly created process. It is then demand-loaded by page faults triggered in the virtual memory manager when the memory-mapped addresses are accessed. It is not loaded into memory in advance.

A lot of the delay in UAC is from the digital signature check it does.

But UAC's digital signature check requires running an algorithm over the entire file to hash check it, which requires the entire file be loaded into memory.

evildictaitor wrote:



Sven Groot wrote:  evildictaitor wrote: When you open an executable file, the process manager has to load the entire program out of memory before it can execute it, which for 700 megs can be a reasonable amount of time, but is still less than a second. That is not true. The executable is memory mapped into the address space of the newly created process. It is then demand-loaded by page faults triggered in the virtual memory manager when the memory-mapped addresses are accessed. It is not loaded into memory in advance. A lot of the delay in UAC is from the digital signature check it does.

But UAC's digital signature check requires running an algorithm over the entire file to hash check it, which requires the entire file be loaded into memory.

I'm not disputing that (although it obviously doesn't need to load the entire file into memory at once, just parts of it, but I think you meant that). Your post implied that it loaded the entire file into memory at normal process creation (without UAC), which is not the case.

someone said:

I also cannot tolerate Vista because of Explorer. Other things are tolerable, but Windows Explorer has changed so much, they should have given it a different name, that's what I think sometimes, it's not the same anymore. The experience I would call is RUDE. And because of Explorer, the whole UI of the OS changes, so the whole experience changes - Control Panel, (My) Computer, Recycle Bin, Network Connections, Network browsing. They've also spoilt Address Book and Add/Remove by making those 2 part of Explorer. Add/Remove although faster at populating apps than XP's Add/Remove is unbearable for me because of the new Explorer and it's ~!@#$ context-sensitive toolbar. Simply too many things are different.

1.  What can be the No.1 annoyance? Removed toolbar buttons and gave me stupid "Burn" and "Organize" buttons. Give me back my Cut/Copy/Paste/Properties/Copy To/Move To/Up. But this is largely solved now due to an addon I found. QTTabBar. It's a .NET addon however so it slows down Explorer startup. It also has some other goodies to change the behavior of the misbehaving rude Vista Explorer.
2.  Has complete amnesia. Doesn't remember a thing. XP's Explorer has partial amnesia.
3.  Back button doesn't behave the same.
4.  'Apply to all folders' doesn't really apply to ALL folders. There's a registry tweak I found for fixing this.
5.  Broken breadcrumb in FTP.
6.  No simple search for non-indexed files. MS says that Vista's search searches both, indexed as well as non-indexed, but only the indexed search is fast. The non-indexed search is much much much slower than XP's non-indexed search, so it takes sometimes a lot of time to find a single file in the same folder. This issue is also now sort of resolved because I use Agent Ransack on Vista for non-indexed search. And there are plenty of search utilities.
7.  Some commands like "Open command window here" only appear when Shift is pressed. Also, it doesn't appear in the left pane.
8.  The preview pane is too slow for videos, sometimes photos too. Large videos absolutely start killing the CPU if the preview "pain" is enabled.
9.  Although copying and replacing is improved, there is too much to read in the dialog and the dialog is too large and occupies a large area of the screen. I'm not a baby to press 3 large buttons when a file conflict occurs. Because the description/explaination is so long, I've to read it many times if I don't remember the position of the button.
10. Cutting and pasting across drives leaves empty folders on the original drives. It should remove them when moving is complete. Definitely a bug.
11. It tries to select the entire row in all views, even in list and details view. So if you click on a white space beside a file, the file gets selected! This is a huge pain when selecting multiple files. Thankfully, they added a relief in the form of check boxes.
12. Applies the wrong template when there are mixed files.
13. Renaming files selects only the filename minus the extension (Resolved by QTTabBar!)
14. Sorts in reverse, that is, when clicked on any column, first sorts in descending order.
15. Auto-refresh/autosort/autoarrange. This is my most hated feature of Explorer and is absolute rudeness to the user according to me. Suppose I paste 5 files, they're all sorted by name and scattered across.
16. Does not show the "free space" remaining in the status bar on all folders unlike XP Explorer.

Not to mention the slow file operations which are reportedly "fixed" in SP1.

I agree with your assesment of Vista's Explorer. Especially the Auto Sort, how does one turn it off?
You mentioned that there is a registry fix for the apply to all folders, care to share it with me?

Thanks

UAC seems to take a while for large files. For instance, if I try to install Fear Combat, it takes about 5 minutes before I get a UAC popup. after double clicking the file.

intelman said:

UAC seems to take a while for large files. For instance, if I try to install Fear Combat, it takes about 5 minutes before I get a UAC popup. after double clicking the file.

I just assumed that had to do with some sort of data check; looking for known malicious patterns of bits or something else that should be blocked.

matthews said:

intelman said:

*snip*

I just assumed that had to do with some sort of data check; looking for known malicious patterns of bits or something else that should be blocked.

As far as I know it just checks the digital signature of the file, it doesn't do any kind of "virus scan" like thing like you're suggesting.

Somebody from the Windows Shell team here?

Don't think so. Too risky. To much people want to kill somebody of that team.