AKICIDW: Windows Explorer is stuck in molasses
First, a bit of background.
I'm a spinner. There's a spinning magazine called Spin-Off that comes out four times a year. I recently bought CDs of most of the old issues of the magazine. I want to read the issues on my iPad. This requires copying the files from the CD to my computer, and importing them (via Dropbox) to my iPad.
When I put the CD in the drive (yes, my computer is old enough to have a CD/DVD drive), it takes a significant amount of time for the contents of the available directory to show (like five to ten minutes).
Once it finally appears, the actual files are hidden. Instead, there's a master PDF that shows thumbnails of the actual issues, and when I click on one of those, it opens up a PDF of the actual issue. At which point I can copy the individual issue to my computer, go back and repeat for all the issues in a given CD. As copy protection, this is pitiful. As a feature designed to annoy me, it works admirably.
But I can cope with this if I have to. It's the slow slow slow loading of the CD contents that's driving me nuts. At the moment, the CD has been sitting there over 10 minutes while I wrote this post, and the contents still aren't showing. There's a gray highlight that creeps across the top of the Windows Explorer box. I assume this has something to do with the indexing function. I looked at the indexing options, and the CD drive (e:) isn't in the list, which means that I can't figure out any way to turn it off. I have this problem with other drives as well, but nowhere near as extreme.
So --
1. Is there some way to deal with the slowness of Windows Explorer? I've googled for settings I can change, and didn't find anything helpful.
2. I went to a command prompt, and used the attrib settings (attrib -s -h -r /s /d *.*) to view the hidden files, but permission was denied to copy them. Is there a way I can do that? That would simplify everything. But I don't know how to run as administrator in DOS offhand.
Any help appreciated.
I'm a spinner. There's a spinning magazine called Spin-Off that comes out four times a year. I recently bought CDs of most of the old issues of the magazine. I want to read the issues on my iPad. This requires copying the files from the CD to my computer, and importing them (via Dropbox) to my iPad.
When I put the CD in the drive (yes, my computer is old enough to have a CD/DVD drive), it takes a significant amount of time for the contents of the available directory to show (like five to ten minutes).
Once it finally appears, the actual files are hidden. Instead, there's a master PDF that shows thumbnails of the actual issues, and when I click on one of those, it opens up a PDF of the actual issue. At which point I can copy the individual issue to my computer, go back and repeat for all the issues in a given CD. As copy protection, this is pitiful. As a feature designed to annoy me, it works admirably.
But I can cope with this if I have to. It's the slow slow slow loading of the CD contents that's driving me nuts. At the moment, the CD has been sitting there over 10 minutes while I wrote this post, and the contents still aren't showing. There's a gray highlight that creeps across the top of the Windows Explorer box. I assume this has something to do with the indexing function. I looked at the indexing options, and the CD drive (e:) isn't in the list, which means that I can't figure out any way to turn it off. I have this problem with other drives as well, but nowhere near as extreme.
So --
1. Is there some way to deal with the slowness of Windows Explorer? I've googled for settings I can change, and didn't find anything helpful.
2. I went to a command prompt, and used the attrib settings (attrib -s -h -r /s /d *.*) to view the hidden files, but permission was denied to copy them. Is there a way I can do that? That would simplify everything. But I don't know how to run as administrator in DOS offhand.
Any help appreciated.