14 April 2009

Reasons To Hate Windows - First of Many

I don't know how the smart technical people out there stand Windows, but I am so glad I don't have to put up with it at home. The latest injury I got from Windows was the following weird scenario:

Excel files in a folder many levels down from the drive letter, like Top_Secret_Financial_Data_2009-04-14.xls in Z:\Blah\Bleah\Bloop\Bah-Humbug, couldn't be copied or changed. Copying any such files to C: drive or some other locations would yield the error message

Cannot copy: File.xls . Not enough server storage is available to process this command.

My C: drive had 30+ GB free, the source where I was copying from had 60+ GB, so why not enough server storage? The "helpful" Microsoft Knowledgebase mention making some changes in the registry because the error could be related to Norton Anti-Virus. I did it anyway, even though I didn't see any logic in the "fix". "Abandon all logic, all ye who enters this world" would be the proper statement at the Bill Gate of Windows Hell. Naturally, the fix did not do jack. In the end, it was a reboot of the server that did the job. No wonder we use filers, some Unix OS to contend with, but no stupid Windows to run upon to worry about misleading error messages and patching.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:20 PM

    I don't know what version of Excel you use, but I still use 2000, and with that version, there's a limit to the number of characters in the path length. The path includes every character from "C:\" to ".xls"

    When I get too deep in the folders, I have to move the file to the root to do anything with it. Serious pain!

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  2. MS Excel 2002 here and the problem you described didn't go away. I've seen the problem before and shortening the filenames or the folder names did take care of the issue. From what I read, even the Excel sheet's name is counted as part of the overall length. Sigh.

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