Download Microsoft SyncToy 1.4

Microsoft’s developers have released a new version of SyncToy and it is available through the Download Center made available, namely 1.4. SyncToy belongs to Microsoft’s PowerToys family and is designed to move, copy, rename or delete files between computers and directories in Windows Vista. The program was originally developed for Windows XP, but has been overhauled since the first release so that version 1.4 requires the .NET Framework 2.0 and only works on Windows Vista. What exactly has changed in the new SyncToy is not known. We have prepared the following overview of the development process:

SyncToy was released as a beta in early August 2005 for Windows XP. We collected feedback from the discussion forum on the Windows XP Professional Photography web site, from customer feedback surveys, from a large number of professional and hobbyist photographers at Microsoft, and from various world-wide forums, sites, reviews and blogs on the web. Most of you (55%) asked for the ability to type in a UNC path to select a folder. We added this feature between the beta release and the v1.0 release. Features we added in response to customer feedback include:

• The ability to type in a UNC path;
• Support for longer folder pair names and ability to widen the left pane to see those longer names;
• The ability to support the maximum length for folder paths, and documentation was added to the help file about how to set up a share to be able to sync deep folder pairs;
• Better handling of the difference in precision between NTFS and FAT timestamps;
• More discoverable link to the help file for information on how to schedule SyncToy using the Windows XP Task Scheduler;
• Support for 800×600 screen resolution;
• Added a warning for users if the selected action will take some time to complete;
• Added brief explanations of the actions in the user interface;
• Improved behavior when choosing folders to include or exclude when there are large numbers of folders involved;
• Improved support for accessibility modes.

In March 2006 we again listened to feedback and release v1.2, which fixes a bug caused by Daylight Saving Time changes, and also added some documentation updates. In October 2006, in response to customer demand, we released SyncToy 1.4 for Windows Vista. This version has all the features and functionality of the previous version. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 (and takes advantage of the improvements available in the 2.0 version of the Framework) and it has been improved to run on Windows Vista.[break]