Phine Solutions web work notes

I have a Buffalo LinkStation on my network which I use as a back up for all my house hold PCs. Recently I was doing some house cleaning on the drive and saw a “trashbox” folder in each configured shared drive, and it stores all the previously deleted items from shared drive. The “recycle bin” feature can be disabled by going to the LinkStation configuration page, and uncheck the feature in each shared drive which is quite simple. But deleting the actual “trashbox” turned out to be a painful process in Vista.

Like the way I perform file deletion everyday, I right clicked on the folder and select “delete” from Vista. A usual popup window started and showed the progress. However it seems Vista can’t make up its mind in terms of how many files are there to delete and how long it’s going to take. The information changed back and forth and the deletion process went on and on. At some point it became painfully slow and I started to suspect there was something wrong with my network, or the shared drive.

Looking at the number of minutes left on the progress window really frustrated me so I decided to use my MacBook to give it a try.

It’s pretty simple to connect to a shared drive from a Mac. Since AppleTalk protocol was enabled in the drive Mac recognized the IP and connected to it immediately. Deleting the files was also a lot smoother. Mac didn’t change its mind on how many files it needed to delete and the process went just like it promised.

I believe the LinkStation is actually Linux based and used Samba for file sharing protocol. Maybe because of the nature of the OS, Mac handles this kind of device better. But Vista was just disappointing. WIth the flux of the rich web applications today, a reliable and simple OS which has great attentions to details will be the ultimate winner.