Speed up working with Windows shares

Sep 16, '02 09:13:41AM

Contributed by: filburt1

I've found that browsing mounted Windows servers (SMB shares) is mindnumbingly slow and shows me the beachball for minutes at a time. My theory is that the Finder tries to download file information for each file so it can display the usual Finder goodies (file icons, number of items in a folder if you have it enabled like I do, etc.)

The solution that I came up was simple: use the Terminal. Servers are mounted in /Volumes/server's IP; for example, /Volumes/192.168.0.128.

So first, mount the server in the Finder by pressing Cmd-K, then open Terminal and type mount to see the server's IP, then cd to the correct /Volumes/ directory and use the normal cp and mv commands for file transfers. Type open to open the file just as if you double-clicked it in the Finder.

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