[G4] Truncated Filenames from Windows? - off topic but curious

Anne Keller-Smith earthpigz at earthlink.net
Sun Jan 12 15:42:17 PST 2003


At 11:19 AM -0800 1/1/03, Steve O'Neill wrote:
>Welcome to one of windoze many dirty little secrets: nothing has been
>updated since DOS, only patches upon patches.  Filenames are stored this
>way, and a separate database maintains the long file names.  The
>long-filename data is frequently lost when you copy (esp to an ISO CD).
>  Even some current Moft software uses the 8.3 names.

Ahhh ...

Now here's another question, and is there another Mac advantage to
put on my list?

The same friend was worrying about some hard drive problems on the
desktop machine that is running Windows 2000, and was having trouble
getting the CD-ROM burner working also. She wanted to back up her
files, and seemed caught in this double glitch.

I had a couple suggestions, among which was to download the files
to her laptop, running Windows 98, if there was enough hard drive
space. She said this wasn't possible because the hard drives are
a different standard.

I have not had trouble copying files anywhere I want from any
Mac machine to any other Mac, space permitting.

I have felt stupid on occasion giving advice to Windows folks,
because they can't do quite a bit, or at least I don't know how
to do it.

The other question, which is on topic, is whether there are
any similar glitches moving from OS9 to X. There haven't
seemed to be any, from my limited experience going back
and forth between Dad's machine running OS X.1.1 and mine
running 9.2.1. Files go back and forth just fine.

Anne Keller Smith, Webdesign
mailto:earthpigz at earthlink.net     http://www.earthpigz.com
Please no attachments! Thanks.




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