Microsoft's great file copying

We'll continue to support XP, and XP is a great operating system, but keep in mind, it will be 12 years old next year.

-- Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer for Microsoft,
Vista SP2 and Windows 7 More Secure than Linux and Mac OS X Leopard, Microsoft claims, Softpedia.

Great operating system? Windows XP's file handling is a joke. For example, try copying files from one disk to another by dragging in Windows Explorer. If XP runs into a single problem, it throws up a dialog box and stops copying entirely; figuring out what got copied and what didn't is your problem. COPY under DOS (sorry, cmd) is a joke. The included XCOPY and its switches attempts to make up for COPY's shortcomings, but is still no cp -pir.

So you wind up using third-party utilities, such as the free Ycopy, to do something as basic to a "great operating system" as copying files.

Writing a robust file copy function strikes me as something that is a lot easier than implementing good security, and I've yet to see Microsoft do that in its many patches and service packs. (Was XP "great" before all the patches and service packs, or after?)

Update: Ycopy skips copying all Eudora *.mbx files, even though Eudora is not running and the files are not open. And it's entirely unsupported. So I'm still looking for a robust free Windows file copy utility; next up: evaluating TeraCopy (1.22 hung on me a lot) and RichCopy (which seems to be adequate).