Wednesday 21 March 2007

Belkin USB 2 File Transfer Cables

When I read the review about this cable I was excited! However as usual reality set in (this never seems to happen to hardware reviewers...).

> The Belkin usb 2.0 File Transfer Cable provides the perfect solution
> that allows you to copy files from PC to PC without the need to install drivers
> when used with Windows ME, 2000 or XP.

Yeah, right, the first thing I had to do was install the drivers and then a "laplink" (PcSync) transfer program (for WinXP SP2).


> Simple drag and drop operation.

Another classic, not only are there no drive letters for drag and drop in explorer but the "you buet" transfer program required me to create a batch file so I could quickly create the destination directories rather than add an extra step to its million step process for setting up each pair of directories I wanted to syncronise.

After this it crashed in many interesting ways which makes me conclude:

* It has a problem with long (but obviously legal) file name/path lengths
* It has problems with large amounts of data
* It has problems with large numbers of files.

Error messages are hopeless, the confirmation screen tells you virtually nothing and progress indication where not wrong is misleading and is in any case minimal.

So how did I fix it? I threw it away and wrote a batch file which uses the free Microsoft "RoboCopy.exe" program to do the copy.

Haven't seen such a piece of cr*p in quite a while. They really excelled.

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