Time remaining...

Mavicator

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2001
1,196
0
19,280
I've always had this problem with windows since Win98. When I'm copying a large amount of data, the time remaining will start out way too low - 3 minutes for example. Once the 3 minutes are up, it says I have a massive amount of time left. Right now it says 768225 minutes remaining to copy 10 gigs of data. Sometimes it counts to zero over and over. The data always transfers fine but it's really annoying! Anyone have a fix for this?

-- I don't see a dotted line... --
 
This is because Windows doesn't know beforehand the speed by which your data will be copied. It estimates a time based upon the initial milliseconds of data burst and the speed at that moment. As data transfer progresses, Windows keeps on getting more accurate estimate of the actual speed and hence it shows more and more close figure to it.

Infact, this is what happens when you transfer a file from a CD, the CD is damaged after halfway through that file. Windows will wait and wait for the data after copying halfway, and then you will see the estimate-time rising and rising and going into many hours for a small 100 kb file (because its taking too much time).

Hope it helped.


Manish

<i>I have started to be irregular with this site now...</i>
 
In some earlier post I called that Microsoft Mintues, these minutes have no bearing on minutes in reality. They are simple numbers displayed to make you think your OS is really doing something.
Thats nothing, I was trying to copy about 5 gigs from my friends machine to mine with win98 over a 10/100 network. I think the time remaining displayed in minutes figured out to be around 27 years. Needless to saw it took some time, but not years to copy.

Screw liberty, give me broadband or give me death!
 
It seems like an easy task to allow windows to figure the time remaining accurately when the transfer takes an hour. I would expect it to calculate the remaining time based on the average transfer rate up to that point. That would give the most accurate result.

Downloading from the net seems to use that process. The time seems to get quite accurate in the last 60 seconds of a 20 minute download.

-- I don't see a dotted line... --