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Tuesday 10 November 2009

Lightweight file exploring with Snowbird



If your machine is a bit dated like mine, you'll notice the occasional time lag when opening a large folder or drive directory. We have to wait for seconds or minutes before Windows can display every file within.

I once tested a folders merge software that was supposed to combine two or more folder into one. I didn't realised at the time that I also made two mistakes. The first one was choosing huge folders with a lot of files in them for the test. And the second was I stopped the merging process before it was finished (after realising the first mistake). I ended up with a huge number duplicated files, over 1000 of them. While most of them are small in size, their total size is about 1GB.

Trying to find and delete them using Windows Explorer was taking too much time. As I mentioned just now, it took about a minute on average for my slow machine to display the files. The slowdown happens because the process of displaying the large number of files was eating up a lot of the available memory.

To speed things up, I decided to use Snowbird. Snowbird may look like a skinny cousin of Windows Explorer, but you'll be smiling ear to ear when it flies into action.

Snowbird doesn't offer a lot features other than the basic file functions of search, open, copy, paste, delete, rename and properties. No thumbnail for previewing image and video files or FTP connection or other fancy stuff. Which is great for the job of finding and displaying large number of files instantly. I only wanted to delete the duplicated files.

To my own surprise I finished the job in just minutes, instead of days as I thought if I were using Windows Explorer. Snowbird definitely soared beyond my expectation. It's very fast, minimalistic and lightweight in terms of memory usage. Snowbird a standalone .exe app that doesn't require an installation.

1 comments:

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