Owner Column in Win Explorer

[bpurser]

When I add the Owner column to the display in Win Explorer, for a shared network drive, and then try to sort by the Owner column, Win Exp crashes...anyone know why, or know a way to make this work? This is one of those "nice to have" things for a pain in the rear projects....

TIA--

Ben

 

[djhawthorn]

Are you sure it's actually crashing and not just pending receiving all the information?

Under Windows XP, if I add the Owner column for a network drive, it takes a good 20-30 seconds to populate the column for a folder with only 100 objects in it. Thankfully, it populates it in a way that I can see it happening. Under 2000 I could guess it won't show anything (and would go "white") until it receives all that information.

If you have a network drive with a great deal of objects, I could understand it taking quite a long time....

The dumber they think you are, the more surprised they'll be when you kill them!

 

[bpurser]

No, I waited for the objects to populate--paged up and down though the whole drive as they popped into view, then once they were all there, ran from top to bottom several times to make sure there were no more delays--took a few minutes as there are lots of objects.

Then I hit the Owner column to sort, and literally went to get a cup of coffee, hit the head, have a phone call, etc...finally after about 10 minutes of the hourglass, check the task manager and it gave me the famous "not responding" message.

Ben

 

[bcastner]

Its hard to say what is going on, other than the fact that you are asking for a sort on an NTFS metadata element which would require a read of each file (rather than obtaining the data from the directory structure).

If these were .AVI or other media files, and there were a lot of them, I would not be surprised at all if it did take quite a while to sort.

That Task Manager indicated that the process was not responding should not be taken as prima facia evidence that the process has stopped or is frozen. About all you can really say is that it did not respond to a status request which could well be true in this case because it was too busy.

I am not saying it cannot be the column handler, a shell extension object that has not been without criticism in the past. I really am saying that it seems very possible to me that you interrupted a running process that takes a long, long time to finish.

 

[bpurser]

OK, I will start it up and let it run all day to see what happens....now that I have that col added, it "crashed" (understanding that it might not have REALLY crashed, just using a convenient term) when I tried to access the drive this AM.

We'll see what happens....

Thanks for the input.

Ben

 

[bcastner]

Some utilities:

DirectoryPrint - 30 day trial -

http://users.pandora.be/Save/TimeAndMoney/directoryprint.html

OldFiles - a batch file. Use Win2k sort afterwards:

http://www.jsifaq.com/SF/Tips/Tip.aspx?id=5731

The native DIR command has a "/Q" parameter to display the Owner. Depending on your needs there is an /O: sort option albeit it does not support a sort by owner. If you redirect to a file you can use the Windows Sort command to sort the output.

Karen's Directory Printer - an excellent freeware:

http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptdirprn.asp#Download