How can I improve the subjective speed of my application?

Question

Today my co-worker noticed that when adding a decimal place to a progress indicator leads to the impression that the program is running faster than without. (i.e. instead of 1,2

Answer 1

Use one of those animated progress bars which look like they are doing something even when they aren't progressing. Also, as peSHIr said - print each filename that you copy and update it really fast - you could even fake it by cycling through a large string array N times a second.