Copying to my pendrive at 461MB/s? Windows 7 reports false transfer speed.

False Transfer Speed in Windows 7

What an incredible transfer speed? Is it an SSD? No. It is a NTFS-formatted Kingston DT-101 G2 USB 2.0 16GB pendrive.

I notice that windows report false transfer speed when copying to a NTFS-formatted pendrive. The issue, however, is not observed when the same pendrive is formatted in FAT32. The speed displayed seems to be reading speed from my SSD into the main memory. This is because the progress bar will stop at the position shown in the screenshot and the final bit of transfer seems to take forever. The whole file is cached in the memory before being written into the pendrive, since the disk cache size is observed to increase significantly during the transfer. At the moment, however, I cannot confirm what is causing the problem because I do not find any similar issue on the internet.

New Task Manager for Windows 8

Microsoft has released some pictures of the task manager in its new design for Windows 8. Below are some pictures.

New Task Manager showing 160 logical processor

Tooltip showing the logical processor ID

Heat map scales to best fit, and a scroll bar appears as needed.

Set process affinity from the Details tab

Fewer details view

More details viewGrouping by process type

Windows 8 Pre-Beta Available for Download

Three days ago, Microsoft has released the Windows 8 Developer Preview, which is a pre-beta version, and is available for everyone to download. It has support for Intel and ARM processor, but the ARM based version is not ready for preview yet.

The new Windows 8 features a Metro style interface, which is specially designed for mobile device such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones with a touch-screen functionality. The newly designed touch interface makes navigation by fingers highly intuitive and natural.

Besides, it will run Internet Explorer 10, a Metro style browser optimized for touch-browsing, and the new Windows Store will host thousands of free and commercial apps.

Meanwhile, for the general x86 and x64 PCs, the user can still switch to the more powerful desktop interface. Therefore, all Windows 7 desktop application may continue to work on Windows 8.

Below are some screenshots of new interface.

Metro style Start Screen

Windows 8 Touch Keyboard