Wednesday, June 19, 2002 |
12:07 - Windows Moment of Zen
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I haven't had occasion to mention one of these in a while-- coincidentally since I got the iMac for work and shelved my Windows2000 machine for use in testing Windows apps and playing AVIs with funky encoding that QuickTime doesn't support (not that WMP lets me copy still frames from them or anything).
All I want is to take a screen shot, paste it into Paint, save it into "My Pictures", and then go to the command line to FTP it to my other machine (because the FTP client built into Windows Explorer works not at all).
So I do that. I save it there. The path appears to be Desktop->My Documents->My Pictures. That's where it appears to be. That's where the files are if I double-click on the "My Documents" on my desktop.
But after painstakingly cd'ing through "Documents and Settings" and "briant" and "Desktop" and "My Documents", I find... that it's empty.
There's also a "My Documents" directly under the "BrianT" level, but-- yes, it's also empty.
Hmm, maybe it's in "All Users.WINDOWS" or "Default User.WINDOWS". Nope, not there either. "Administrator"? Nope.
It's only after much scrolling and prodding that we discover that the files, as well as a Word document that seems to be accessible by Word and nothing else, are in a "My Documents" folder directly under the C:\ root. Same with "My Music" and "My Download Files".
What the hell is this? Does every user share these top-level folders? Or does Windows actively copy all the files around the system, out of your user-specific folder and into this top-level thing every time you log in? Is this their helpful way of making the files accessible to you-- shuffling them into a completely backwards and counterintuitive location so you don't have to go down two extra levels in Windows Explorer to find them? Oh, thank you for your generous assistance.
This is Microsoft's idea of a multi-user operating system, is it? Good Lord.
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