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Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files
Bruce Schneier has said that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. With Vista, Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job of making premium content files not copyable. Now a few readers have tipped us to a new wrinkle: Vista also makes it very, very slow to copy, rename, or delete ordinary files. Here is a Microsoft TechNet thread on the problem. The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely. And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.
I can confirm this. Copying a 10MB file from one directory to another on the same partition, on a fast 7200rpm 16mb cache SATA 1.5gb/s hard drive, can take 5-10 seconds, whereas it's instant on XP for me.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
For very very basic functionality?
What is Vista doing? Factoring large primes in 640KB RAM?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
What the heck is this supposed to mean:
--snip--
"I've seen this bug in action, and trust me, it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM," one Reg reader complained.
--snip--
Is the guy trying to be sarcastic or something?
One of the complaints about the Linux community is how people tell noobs to RTFM or use Google.
:-)
Interesting that the last post on this Microsoft Technet discussion is "learn to use Google". Seems that any fanboy whether it's a Microsoft fanboy or not is susceptible to giving people this treatment
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Even XP is painfully slow removing files. I remember uninstalling Steinberg Virtual Guitarist application that has a couple of thousands of small wav files - it took about 20 minutes to uninstall that software with 2.8GHz, 2GB machine that has SATA disk.
I realize "The Register" is the "National Enquirer" of IT, but what the heck does this quote in TFA mean: "it's as if you're copying over a 64k link using only 256mb of RAM"
I've used Windows 2000 with only 256M of RAM and it's quite speedy...I've run a remote desktop session over a 56kbps link and although noticable, it's pretty speedy. (and yes, I've copied big files over that link)
How does mixing speed (bps) and RAM (M) work anyway? It's sorta like saying "I've driven my car 50kph with a cat,ferret, and dog in the back seat but when the seat covers are blue it seems really slow"
TDz.
I used to get frustrated waiting for large file copies in XP but Vista is horrible. I can't get it to un-sleep properly either. I'll drop the lid and open it later and hit a few keys. 2 minutes later the screen is still black so I'll try to shut it down or start it up and I wind up holding the start button for 10 seconds to get anything to work. It's also annoying that 90% of the time the battery is still drained when I shut the lid.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (an Intel Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my ancient Mac running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista PC that has run faster than its Mac OSX counterpart, despite the Vista PC's same chip architecture. My 286/12 with 2 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.4ghz mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.
Vista lovers, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
That's not XP's fault, that's the fault of the software's uninstaller - it was one of those that manually checks for each file it installed being there, then deletes it, then goes to the next. Those are so annoying! I wish they'd at least give the option to just delete the whole install directory (which XP would do pretty much instantly, even with thousands of files).
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Hey, They stole my stuff. My code takes very long time to do trivial tasks. That is my idea. They stole my idea!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nowhere in the thread does it mention DRM. Where did the summary of the article come up with this assumption? I am not saying that I would be surprised if this were the case, but random accusations and misleading summaries...we can leave that to the National Enquirer ... or Slashdot.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
The reason a lot of Linux users will tell new users to google it or RTFM is because of cost. Linux is free in a lot of ways, and one of them is monetary. While you dont pay for it with cash, you pay for it with little or no support. You should be prepared to search for answers online and in the manual. The difference with Vista, is that you paid for it. With paying should come support for the product. Telling customers to look else ware is not a good idea. They may find more than the answer, and maybe the wrong one.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
See: most of their previous operating systems
How does copying a file over a 64k link on a machine with 256MB of RAM compare to copying a file over Gigabit ethernet on a machine with 4 Gigs of RAM?
Gah, beaten to it by an AC.
Actually, I've been using Vista for over a month now on a P4 (2.8 Ghz) with 1Gig of RAM and I haven't noticed slow file copy speeds. Copying files over the network seems slightly faster. No, I haven't run any scientific experiments proving this, but if it was significant, I would probably notice.
My issue is with sidebar.exe... sometimes is takes over 200MB of memory. I know it's probably one of the gadgets I'm using, but one would think buggy gadgets would have been planned for.
Remember, you aren't as "joined at the hip" to Microsoft as many people might think. Do a little research, take some small risks, and actually learn about your computer instead of only using it. The rewards are many and I have a desktop machine that is just about functionally equivalent to an XP box. I get some quirks with websites but that is because the website might have been built in an MS-centric technology. Even Firefox on Windows might have difficulty handling that website. I can use video streaming, mp3s, edit digital photos and more. Moreover, I do not suffer from the same security woes of Windows. While Windows XP has over a 100 patches for its fairly base OS, a look at FreeBSD's website reveals far fewer patches. FreeBSD also gives me more accessible control over the kernel so I can set certain TCP flags to timeout a connection sooner thus not leaving ports open. The firewalling/packet filtering facilities are also immeasurably better than Microsoft's. I can keep on going.
Why is the parent modded +5 Funny?
It asks a very direct, simple, honest and logical question.... and it's been modded funny. I think Slashdot should simply BAN all articles / Slashvertisements on Vista until sanity prevails in the moderation system on these boards.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Vista is definitely slower at copying, deleting, pretty-much all file processing commands. I can say this from my own experiences; God help you if you have thousands of files to process.
But you should check out the new animations they made for the copy/move/delete functions, whoa! They've got, like, flipping rectangles and shit, and the animations are so shiny!
At this rate, I bet the next service pack will bring a new 3D-accelerated BSOD too, complete with shiny and flippy messages to tell you your system is screwed, but man... check out that neat animation, that'll take the sting off at least!
(Oh, and to finally wrap up the karma bonus once and for all, Vista was the reason I finally converted to Linux. Huzaa!)
You neglected to incorporate the Microsoft Standard into your calculations.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
How can this be insightful? This is a reworking of an old troll, which originally went like this:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Its an old mac bahing troll post that used to appear in every mac story, and was completely inaccurate. the author just switched some of the names.....
What I find a little scary is now its moded interesting...
I'm about as anti-Windows as they come, and everyone around me will attest to the frequency at which I bitch about Windows (as I am in the unenviable position to have to use it on occasion at work). So I'm the last person who would use Vista, or defend it, but ...
... I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad. 20 minutes to copy a 17M file on a local disk, something is clearly wrong here. In the worst of conditions, that operation should take not longer than a few seconds. If your experience is typical and consistent with others, I'd be keen to read some more formal benchmarks to this effect. But I really think there's no way Vista is working as designed on your computer. Questioning Microsoft's competence is daily routine for me, but this pushes the realm of reason.
The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely.
That means it's not available on the general download site; you have to ring up and ask for it. That's all. Unless you have premier support, in which case it's available on the premier site.
And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.
?
How so?
Foreach file in filelist
.delete
uac.allow()
Next()
So far, my two biggest complaints about Vista are the file move/copy/delete times. We bought the upgrade version for testing on some PCs at work. I did the upgrade procedure and then proceeded to try to clean up the system after the upgrade. To delete a directory of about 500mb it took 14 minutes. The other big problem I had was that it failed to come out of standby properly. The screen would always stay black even though the system appeared to be out of standby mode. I thought the problems were due to the upgrade, but I did a clean install and still had those problems.
There is only 1 reason i can foresee, for the time being, that would make me upgrade to windows vista.
That reason is DirectX 10, which is exclusive to windows vista.
This version apparently runs faster then DX9 too... once the drivers fully support it.
Saying that, in the short term, i fully expect any games that come out to support both the DX9 and possibly the DX10 framework. But those running on DX10 will run faster, and possibly look nicer too.
But it'll take some game i haven't heard about to force my hand. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
Considering that I live, precisely, in the middle of nowhere. And here in nowhere, SBC is too lazy to roll out any sort of internet connection that isn't this.
My daughter got a new laptop with 1gb of memory and a sata drive. You'd think it had 256mb of memory with the time it takes to do darn near anything. The funny part is the the Linux partition on her laptop screams. Yup...that's enough to make me want to go out and buy Vista...
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
As a Vista beta tester, I've personally reported the file copying bug at least half a dozen times. That, along with the crap UAC prompts, seems to be the least of my troubles. When do people start harping on about Vista's extremely poor video and sound-playback performance? On older systems, the move to VMR for all video playback severely decreases playback performance. For example, on a Dell M60 latop with a Centrino 2.0Ghz (single-core) CPU, 2 gigs of ram, 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive, and a nVidia Quadro 700 Go w/ 128meg video card I can playback raw HDTV without a hiccup. In Vista, the same playback drops nearly half the frames regardless of the various decoding codecs used. Disabling Aero leaves the problem in the same situation. Disabling sound (AC'97 sound) lets a few less frames to be dropped. This is not an isolated problem but exists on many machines.
This problem is a lot bigger than just file operations. I really have to wonder why anyone is going to bother with Vista for anything expect the lastest/fastest consumer/gamer machines. I'm sticking to XP and my next laptop will be an Apple Mac Book Pro. I'll vote with my dollars, thanks.
But, after a week or 2, it suddenly cleared up.
I never did track down the cause of it, but disabling volume shadow copy and indexing did mitigate the problem a little.
Once it cleared up, re-enabling them did not cause any problems.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics?
Woah! I know you guys are angry, but don't all three of you stand up at once!
The original generic sig.
I factor large primes all the time, and in my experience, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
A long time ago - around '95 - a was at a friends house and he was doing some stuff on his computer. At one point he rebooted from windows into OS/2 and executed a large copy (along with a few other things) in OS/2 and said: 'booting into OS/2 and doing this is a lot faster'.
:) or simply not use Explorer (I did try a few explorer replacement programs. Now I just queue the files and wait).
I found that really funny at the time. A while later (much more recently) another friend of mine had dualboot on his main machine - XP and Redhat. Once again, I got to see someone reboot a machine into a different OS to execute file transfers (in this case, across to another hard drive, and across the network). Granted, he had several scripts that he used on redhat that assisted what he was doing. What he said was that the same speed could only be achieved in XP by using FTP or similar utility (to his knowledge).
This news of Vista having the same problem (sounds like the same problem anyway - but worse) when copying files doesn't shock me. My slower machine (running XP SP2, a 2.4Ghz 512MB ram) can take ages to copy files - even if it is just across to another hard drive. When copying across the network I set up all of the copies and leave it (don't bother even trying to run anything else while it is doing this). On my newer machine, a 3Ghz 2GB ram (etc etc) dual core machine I expected this 'copy lag' to go away. N'uh uh. When I copy large (100MB+ files) around (drive to drive, or drive to network) the machine has a tendancy to lag badly. The 2.4Ghz machine lags so badly you can browse with Mozilla but not much else. The 3.0Ghz machine (so far as I am aware) should _not_ lag this badly.
To answer the questions:
1) Yes, I have looked into the hardware side of both of these machines and tried some tweaking. No luck.
2) Yes, I have looked into software settings including DMA and drivers.
3) Yes, I have trawled around the web looking for answers. The only answer I have atm is to use FTP
Any suggestions welcome. Yes, I have googled.
Lets not even start on trying to network XP "professional" with XP "home". *argl*
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I think you dont give M$ enough credit. I think they employ folks to test and evaluate how far they can push push consumers ( aka sheep ) before they actually bolt.
M$ is serving themselves, the RIAA, and the MPAA with Vista, not you.
I think they have very carefully examined this and many more yet to be discovered issues and have figured out how bad they can make it for consumers while serving their real customers, big business and the govenment.
Give them more credit, they are good at this.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I'm terribly unhappy with Vista. I was pretty much forced to get it when I bought my most recetn laptop. No XP choice was available for the lappy that I wanted.
It is slow. It is a pain. And no, it isn't because I'm old. And yes, I'm willing to learn new stuff. It's because it just doesn't work. I see errors, it's slow, and it isn't any real improvement over XP from a GUI or user experience point of view. Blah!
How to Download YouTube Videos
Wonder how this'll affect the server variants. It would just be funny as heck if Microsoft died in the server market because they had to put in all this DRM nonsense.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is clearly something wrong with this operation in Vista.
I jumped in early to test our software for compatibility, so I have three completely different Vista computers with different configurations. They range from a Core2Duo to an dual CPU dual core Opteron.
Copying and deleting are a chore. The XP systems routinely finish deleting, copying and begin testing before the Vista systems have actually deleted a file. They are still counting files.
Don't even think about running source safe on Vista if you have more than a handful of files. GLV can take an afternoon.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I run Vista Business Edition on an AMD64 X2 4200 with 2 Gigs of ram. Performance wise I haven't had any real issues with this exception. I read several posts, flamers and fan boys aside here are my results. I used a folder containing 51 files for a grand total of 142 megs. When I copied this folder from one hard drive to another on my box (both are WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives) and viewing the "More Details" on the copy dialog Vista reported a speed of 22Mb/sec. When I copied the same folder from my desktop to one of my network shares the dialog reported a top speed of 441kb/sec and said it would finish in 7 minutes. When I ftp the folder to one of my servers it averaged out to 7,997.3kb/sec and took 24.63 seconds. Seems to me something is a bit off...
I just recommended a Dell system for my family 2000 miles away. I'm praying to God I won't have to do any tech support over the phone. Hopefully they understand I've never even seen a computer with Vista installed. I hope the 1GB of memory is enough.
The author's merely employing a form of stylistic parallelism: hard to copy protected files (an intentional act, likely), but also hard to copy normal files (a nonintentional act). It's merely a comparison.
You're the one reading in the assumption about DRM being the cause.
On XP, i'm using a very handy opensource soft called supercopier, which allow me to pause, queue, resume files copies...
it doesn't works on vista yet; and if I don't have that and if the copies are indeed longer, it's just one more reason not to move yet...
I can't seem to reproduce your problem. Copying a 10MB file is instant, extracting a 10MB zip across drives takes about 4 seconds. This is on a machine that scores a 1 on the "Windows Experience Index".
I was copying an HD-DVD backup I made from one hard drive to another and it took a considerable amount of time -- as you'd expect from a 24.8GB folder. But Vista happily said "about 30 seconds remaining" midway through the operation as it began copying one of the main files of the movie -- a 12GB file.
.EVO files that were many times larger.
Now I may not be an expert programmer but I'd have thought that with Vista telling me that 24GB of the operation is remaining and even saying that the throughput is currently 35MB/sec, it wouldn't be particularly hard to calculate 24576/35 instead of quoting "about 30 seconds".
It's almost as if Vista was calculating that it had copied about half of the files in the directory (.MAP files ranging from 2KB to 8KB in size) and that it would take just as long to copy the
I tried doing the exact same thing on XP and the remaining time was somewhat accurate.
Moving and copying files on Vista is terrible, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think that most file operations are horrific under Vista.
If you're daring enough, try to set 50,000 files to Read Only. Under XP this would take about 20 seconds. Under Vista this takes almost 7 minutes.
Vista is a huge step backwards. The performance is crummy, the eye candy pales in comparison to OS X and Beryl. Microsoft really dropped the ball.
---
a trainwreck is a trainwreck is a trainwreck
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you're running Windows XP (or Gnome on top of Linux for that matter) with 256 megs of RAM, you'll have a much longer wait while transferring a large file over a 64k connection than if you have a gig or so of RAM. This is especially the case if transferring the file isn't the only thing that you're doing at the moment.
I can copy 2 GB of data from one SATA drive to another on my 2 year old Debian box in 1 minute. This and the slow network stack have always been two of my biggest complaints against Windows. Glad I kicked that habit. I do miss running new games, but I've got NWN 1, XCOM on running on DOSBOX, and UQM and hopefully those will tide me over until I find a Wii.
I know it's popular to knock Vista here but I'd like to point out Linux isn't all that fast deleting files either. Specifically, the design of the ext2/ext3 filesystem requires that for large files the kernel sit there and thrash your disk painstakingly deleting inodes. For really large files in fact (13GB or more!) deleting the file can take over a minute on most IDE based disks!
What I'm saying here is that maybe there's something in Vista's new version of NTFS that has a similar limitation. Or perhaps the Windows 2000 behavior of zeroing sectors when deleting files has been expanded to overwriting with bit patterns randomly to make it more "secure".
Just sayin'
I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad.
It isn't, it's made up, see the other responses about this being a reworking of an old anti-Mac troll.
But yes, given the content of this article, it had me fooled at first too. I'm no fan of Vista and I'm happy sticking with XP, but now I'm not sure we can trust any of the bad claims about Vista being thrown about here.
So he's effectively paid 3 grand for a silent hi-def DVD player.
:P
And when they invalidate the keys because of the hacked HD-DVD/Blue Ray, it won't even do that!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
DRMed files have that fact clearly visible in the file metadata (which you can see by right clicking on a media file and choosing "Properties")
DRMed files have nothing to do with this, the problem is largely upgraded systems where the original accounts that owned files and directories no longer exist.
even dos based norton commander is faster
.) is faster, especially when deleting large numbers of files. Part of the reason is probably GUI overhead as it displays every file that is being deleted. People can try this themselves and see -- as it happens I had to delete, on two different occasions recently, something like 50,000 files. In the largest folders I would delete them from DOS, the dozens of folders with just a few files in each I did from XP's GUI. And related to this, why does XP not have deltree? That would allow even more to be done at DOS. Oh, that's right -- remove the power from users as you pretend to give them upgrades.
DOS anything (including DEL
I come here for the love
In Soviet Russia, slowly, Vista copies you... Ty for reading! http://borntoclone.com/
Born, to clone
"wake".
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
...like trying to make water not wet.
You mean like ice right?
--AC
I had enough years ago. It is my computer and my data. I will not pay a tax and give control of MY computer to a third party or ask permission or pay royalties (forced upgrades) to get access to MY data. No forced registration. No spying.
I bought a system preloaded with eComStation. I paid no Microsoft tax. All you have to do is support THE vendors of good quality products.
You can avoid the Microsoft tax and DRM OS and viruses too.
eComStation user group - http://www.os2voice.org/
eComStation - http://www.ecomstation.com/
eComStation preloaded
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/preloads.htm
Even preloaded with a OpenOffice.org. Uses high quality ECC memory
i don't know what it does in the background when you try to copy files. i just know that it sucks. trying to copy a few megs of files doesn't need it to "Calculate" for several minutes. when my hard drives can transfer 33-70 megs a second, why does it seem like 1 meg a second is the max in Vista? why does it need to spend MORE time Calculating the transfer than doing the actual transfer?
I have to call BS. Wouldn't recognize the Wireless NIC? Blame the OEM, not MS. I've not had any problems with wireless in Vista. Or did you install some off-brand NIC after?
Isn't the easiest way to "make water not wet" to freeze it?
--
Franklin Brauner
I agree. This is an issue that will eventually be corrected in a service pack. (Pretty much anything that starts out in hotfixes ends up in a service pack.) It's not like this is going to be a permanent problem/curse of using Vista.
BUT - the big reason I see for pointing it out to the "general Vista using public" is to make people more aware of the added complexity and potential headaches DRM brings to the table. Until manufacturers give up on the idea of protecting digital content through DRM measures, we're going to keep running into incompatibility problems, performance issues, and other nasty side-effects in the products we use.
It's easy to tell Vista's Explorer is slow at copying/deleting files... the command line tool robocopy, included with Vista, is so much faster it isn't even funny.
Transfers over the network (FTP, Windows share, etc.) are painfully slow, too. First I thought this was about Vista's network drivers and UAC, but I guess it's the same problem that causes slow file operations.
A) isn't an intelligent reason. It's an unfortunate consequence. ...?)
B) is a non-sequitor (i.e a "wtf" monent)
C) why linux (that is a non-sequitor as was B)? As to Open Office, it's the same speed near enough (compared over the work life). And WHICH version of Office files are being passed around, and since OOo is opening them too, we seem to be at another "huh?" moment.
D) Troll, troll, troll troll....
E) What about "services"? Where are the network settings (in network, wireless, My Computer,
F) Doesn't exist. More in the other direction. Note that the OP asked why you'd get Vista instead of another OS. That OS could include XP. The only reason why XP is out of the bundle is because MS aren't selling it and causing any big box-shifters that do to the MotS to be banished to the No Market Funds category.
So these aren't intelligent reasons. We have one unfortunate consequence, three sidetrips off the discussion, a troll and something that could be countered as a problem in Vista (so therefore, why would someone choose Vista when they have to learn what SSID means in Vista-land if they will refuse Linux because you may have to know what NDISWrapper means).
It's available in several forms. As a solid: instant water, just add heat. As a gas: instant water, just distill. As a gaseous mixture: instant water, just add a spark. OK, the last one's not water; but it's the most entertaining.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Perhaps Vista is busy calculating all the MD5's for each file... so that later on, it can ship the filename and MD5 over the Internet to some server somewhere where someone can later check them to see if they match files of movies, songs, etc, that you are pirating.
Is it a coincidence that the captcha I must type in to post this is the word "eviller"?
why would vista take forever to move delete (permanently and moving to recycle bin) and copying files. it's not really the operation that's slow but the calculating time remaining stays up forever after the operation is complete and keeps it from starting for a long time? anyone have any ideas
because many handles and processes are working simaltiousely, your hard disk activity is so busy with all processes, so it should need so long time for this, add to this, you need UAC to be on and shows you prompt message for file operations.
Good luck
Ahmed Mahdy | MSDN & TechNet Forums Moderator | Blogs for Microsoft Tech. http://www.ahmed-mahdy.com/
And from Steven in response.
Your statement can be boiled down to:
The O/S is so horribly written and bloated with un-needed features that no matter how fast your computer is it can never possibly process the system calls and manage file handles fast enough for Windows Vista to provide the user with a timely interaction experience.
This is just a smoke and mirrors tactic. Basically, you're making a statement that the person's computer isn't powerful enough to do a simple operation such as a file system table modification (moves and deletes are simply table modifications if they are on the same fixed disk and logical partition), without even asking for hardware specifications. Your argument here is vacuous.
I notice you are the moderator of this forum, do you hold any offical position with Microsoft? Can you tell us concreately what will be done about this issue?
Thank you, --Steven
No thank YOU Steven.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
You beta testers let me know when the kinks have been worked out of Vista. I didn't install Xp until sp2. I don't expect things to be any different with Vista.
Speak truth to power.
Actually, Vista was surprisingly fast a copying big stuff here, so I guess that new "feature" of auto-adjusted file caches (that this is really all about) hits in both directions, depending on if the underlying network understands what Vista wants to do or not. In the latter case, things may indeed get even worse than XP. However, it's important to realize this isn't an across the board worsening.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've heard that the improved network transfer speed is because, among other things, Vista can use much larger packets, which makes it less likely to be latency bound.
I can't explain why I'm seeing faster copies while other people are seeing slower copies.
...is that by using reiserfs, you are embellishing the name of a murderer.
...and that appears to be just what they're trying to do with the file i/o in Vista... freeze it.
One of the reasons for Apple's successes under Steve Jobs has been his knack for sensing what will sell and refusing to ok a prototype etc if it doesn't feel right to him. While I admire Bill Gates' commitment to charity, it seems he has been out of the loop on this and Microsoft has jumped the shark. If Jobs had been head of Microsoft and discovered that Vista was much slower than XP at copying/deleting files, I'd bet he would have not released it until this was done right rather than making it pretty. Other than Windows ME, all my other Windows' upgrades from 3.0 to XP made me say, "should have done this sooner." I can't recall any signicant problems running older software. If my current system dies and I need to get a new one, I will definitely let being able to buy it with XP not Vista be my first selection critereon, listen up Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. By the way, my copy speed with my 1.6 GHz XP system is about 25 Mbytes/sec for C drive to C drive copy of a 750 Mbype file and about 30 Mbytes/sec for C drive to a USB external. Not unreasonable considering 7200 rpm disk drive continuous read/write speeds.
When companies treat consumers as dumb blonds (Vista is like a dumb blond, pretty but slow), they are starting on the path to failure. I will always remember Ford's response to poor gas mileage due to their emission controls in the 1970's was to increase the gas tank size so consumers would not need to fill up more often. When gas prices jumped consumers did notice and switched to Japanese carmakers. So Vista requires more memory to do to the same things as XP. MS hopes that the consumer will not realize the speed up due increasing memory and faster computer will compensate enough for the slowness of Vista that the comsumer will not notice.
Bill it's time to apologize to us for Vista and ofter free XP to any Vista customer until you get Vista right.
Upgrades? Very people will actually buy Vista. They will get it preinstalled when they buy a new computer. Such a nice thing for the computer company to do to...errrrr, for them!
...laura
Atleast with the compatibility update recently they have added a long list of applications that now seem to be working a lot better.
Here is the list of applications, games and compatiblity fixes; there is many more of these big list to come and have fixed several issues I had with older software.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932246
Unfortunately AOL9.0 is on that list and I wished they just left it in the handicapp section
If you want to have vista's cool graphical features howabout going to stardock and purchasing a copy of windowsblinds. They have the cool transparant windows and other fx that vista has but also more! and when they hog up your system you can just kill the process and xp wakes up again!...... And DAMN stardock is a load cheaper than vista.
That is to say that a one byte file would take just as long to copy within the same partition as would a 10mB file? Maybe sorting out the disk cache takes some time. But surely not seconds.
Clearly computing has moved beyond my meager understanding. I wish it a good trip, but I don't feel much inclined to go along for the ride. Let me know when they have things sorted out, and I'll look to see if I'm interested in the finished product (They do intend to finish Windows someday, right?). In the meantime, I'm switching to a Slackware desktop.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Anyway disregard the prior (stupid) message.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Part of the problem is that many users no longer realize what they are asking the machine to do. If you're copying a bunch of files and don't give a r4t$4$$ about watching the icons as they disappear, just minimize the window. It is not a Windows problem. On Linux when copying large amounts of files using a terminal window and displaying the names, I watch the first few seconds and then minimize the terminal window, same thing.
In my experience Vista is usually faster when copying files (because it uses larger chunks, search for an article from Mark Russinovich on the I/O changes in Vista for the details), what is slightly confusing is that the calculation of remaining time is quite slow. The copying is in progress anyway so once you get used to ignoring the "calculating...", everything is fine.
Can I get around this by installing cygwin and using GNU cp? Or is that even slower?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Why do I need to even consider Vista? Why would I need anything more than XP? What do I want to run that requires Vista?
The answer: NOTHING
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
but still made me chuckle cereal onto my keyboard.. From the microsoft technet forum:
Microsoft just released an update, but you have to download it separately. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download and following the insructions.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
I'm calling BS on this one too. I am using Vista RC1 on a cheap Compaq laptop and it recognized and installed drivers for everything but the sound and my HP Deskjet printer. Not to mention that XP drivers worked fine for those items under Vista. All my games work on Vista including newer stuff like Oblivion and older games like Diablo 2. Try using the 32 bit version of Vista, the 64 bit one sucks horribly for software and driver support.
Isn't this kind of BASIC file management one of the core purposes of an operating system? Seems like this of all things should work perfectly and blazing fast.
Makes me think of a car company making a new car with all the bells and whistles, but it's not good at turning or going in reverse. HA!
So pathetic. I'm sticking with XP for now.
Maybe I'm a lucky one here, but I've been running Vista Business Edition on my desktop for about a month and moving files seems no faster nor slower than with XP. I copied a 10gb CD image archive from my desktop on the Vista System drive to a folder on a storage hard drive in about a minute. Wasn't too bad at all..
I didn't rtfa, but I'd like to know what kind of hard drives they used, what the performance index was, and how much ram they had. Both hard drives in question for me are 7200rpm, 8mb cache, SATA 1.5gbps Western Digital HDDs. My performance index was a 4.something. I have a gig of PC3200 RAM (2 sticks, running in dual-channel configuration).
*shrug* YMMV.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
'There were stories about how Mozilla's uninstaller would delete your entire harddrive based due to exactly that option .. What would happen is that people would install Mozilla to "C:\"'
..
.. Re:Not XP's fault (Score:4, Informative)
What stories, where did you see these references to Mozilla deleting the C:\ directory? Well with Firefox 2.0.0.3 unless you select Custom, then it installs to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. Selecting Custom and C:\ and this msg pops up. Even under Win98 it still won't allow you to install to C:\
'You don't have access write to the installation directory Click OK to select a different directory'
C:\DOS, C:\DOS RUN, RUN DOS RUN
--
was
davecb5620@gmail.com
Robocopy preparing to copy files.... Robocopy commencing copying.... Copying in progress.... Copying complete.
Robocopy commencing two hour disk thrashing session... (grind, grind, grind, grind, grind... KICK!) Robocopy mistreatment alert! Robocopy mistreatment alert!!!
sigfault (core dumped)
Hence my subject "Obligatory" It's FUNNY when something that's a troll actually ends up being true. Shesh. Some people have no sense of humor.
Yes, and the answer is....
42
I have to copy a lot of files around in preparation for a build of our software, and copying about 50MB (one single file) via Gigabit Ethernet is much slower than XP. The best I can get is 10-13 MB/sec. It should be much much faster.
When I have to copy hundreds or thousands of files to/from a server, it's painfully slow too.
For sure this happens when copying files to/from Windows Home Server via Vista. What took me MINUTES from my XP laptop took HOURS on my NEW Vista Laptop.
I haven't tried duplicating this behavior DIRECTLY to the XP machine, but I will do so.
This is an awesome bug, shows a major flaw in the OS, anti MS people will be overjoyed.. but for now it is JUST A BUG.. there is even a "hotfix" (and yes I know hotfixes suck).
Some people seem to get way to much enjoyment over every microsoft failing, At least the word is getting out and microsoft will address the problem, for me I won't be switching to Vista anytime soon but still it seems to be selling well enough and there are bound to be problems whenever an app is this widely distributed (20mil copies out in the wild now?).
Do we really need 200 posts about how much MS sucks or can we just have a technical discussion that might prove some insight into why this is happening...
Anyone use the hotfix yet?
But, in my case I never EVER use the shiny explorer or 'drag and drop' methods of file transfer. GUI's are for application, not file management.
:-) XP system... Identical versions of scripts are being used, as well as the external (USB) drives are the same. Ztree file speed meters show relatively same performance throughput.
I use a command (cmd) window, and either Robocopy (built in to Vista now - used W23 resource kit version on my previous XP box) or XXCOPY for my various transfer needs. I use ZTreeWin for file tree navigation. Doing Robocopy backups from a 46GB directory of images is notably faster now on the Vista system than the previous 'decently endowed'
Go Figure.
Like many have stated, the calculation of the time it will take to copy/move a files and folders is extremely long and should be looked into. When the calculation has completed (or seems to), the data transfer time is somewhat the same as in XP, except in certain circomstances: - When the "Windows Search" service is running, the data transfer rate seems to suffer greatly (damn you "SearchFilterHost"!). If I'm using iTunes (with a 80 GB library), a virtual machine (Virtual PC, Virtual Server, VMware Workstation or VMware Server) or browsing a folder binded to a Subversion database (TortoiseSVN) when data indexing begins, the search service constantly jumps to 35% usage and I am forced to kill it entirely due to horrible system lag. I've since disabled the service. Also, based on the actual time to transfer a file via the network or directly on the hard drive, it is clear that the data transfer rate displayed is far from being acurate. I'm currently using a Toshiba Satellite A100 VA9 (Intel Core 2 Duo T5500, 2GB DDR2-533, 200GB 4200RPM HDD, nVidia Geforce Go 7600 /w dedicated 128MB) with Vista Ultimate Edition.
'Well, specifically, on Slashdot...'
.. Re:Mozilla deletes C:\ ..
Ahh, I see, Mozilla uninstaller used to delete your entire harddrive if you selected to install in C:\ and not choose the default installation directory.
was
davecb5620@gmail.com
Unfortunately I fail to see how FTP will solve the problem. If it wasn't the rest of your comment, I would say that this FTP thing was taken from a movie scene... One of those movies where 'hackers' 'hack' into banks by disabling a screensaver and then typing something (without looking at the keyboard or pressing Space\Backspace a single time) in a shiny 3D GUI, etc.
Just think about it, deep inside the FTP client will call the same CreateFile, FileWrite, FileRead functions that exist in the Windows API, why would these calls be faster if they are issued by a FTP client? Are all FTP clients alike? Sheesh...
You mentioned FTP as if it was some sort of a mythical silver bullet.
I can only think of one possibility - when files are copied locally, the respective functions are called to read the input file and then called once again to write the output file; while the other approach (download it from a network) only calls those functions once*. This explains the speed boost, but I doubt it is significant.
You can test this 'file off the network theory' by downloading from something other than a FTP server (try HTTP, SCP, SMB, etc).
* It depends on how they were implemented; it is very likely that copying files via NetBIOS is also triggered by CreateFile (and a UNC path is used), but somewhere inside it will call network-related code.
The saddest poem
Was someone handing out mod points in Redmond this week?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Microsof was asking the EU, not so long ago, why anyone would want to buy a "crippled" version of Windows without Windows Media Player. Well, this is the answer... take out Windows Media Player, the ability to play "premium" protected content, the ability to read encrypted Office files, and all the code, components, and requirements that go with it... and it's the "full" version that seems crippled.
Although its not consistent, there are times when deleting files takes a rediculous amount of time. Its completely unnaceptable. I get similar behave sometimes just by opening folders. I click on a folder and have to wait for the green bar to do something, I'm not sure what, are you trying to make thumbnails of my text files, theres only ten? From what I can tell it has something to do with either search indexing or thumnails.
Finally, a chance to turn the tables...
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Dell (a Core 2 Duo w/1 Gig of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my G3 iMac, running OS9.2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
(the original rant)
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I've seen nothing but crap quality video & sound. The sound is so compressed, it's painful to listen to. And believe me, I'm no audiophile, so if it's bad, you know it's *BAD* ... like compare the picture quality of 1080p to YouTube if you want to know how much of a drop in quality it feels like (yeah, I'm comparing pictures to sound here, but like I said, I'm no audiophile, I just know that the sound sucks--we thought the speakers were broken at first).
Oh, and this makes TV Tuners worthless under Vista. I don't know if it's DRM or what, but it totally sucks ass. Personally, I'm planning to avoid Vista like the plague.
No wonder it takes so long: You are attempting to delete C:\123.wav Allow or Deny?
You are attempting to delete C:\456.wav Allow or Deny?
You are attempting to delete C:\789.wav Allow or Deny?
etc....
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
Longhorn is the new Cairo. Didn't you notice?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One new and frustrating feature of Vista is that apparently regular users and Explorer are not allowed to overwrite files in x386Program Files (yeah I'm one of those masochists trying out Vista/64)
I tried to download a new ini file from my webmail in order to test an application and Vista said: 'you can't do that -would you like to download the file to your root directory instead?' SO I had to download it to there and then drag it to my application folder in x386Program Files. Once I did it that way I then got the familiar and tiresome Allow or Deny? popup accompanied by the greying out of the desktop to tell me something BAD is about to happen.
I didn't try it in Firefox -maybe it would have worked with it, but I kind of doubt it. I guess there is some security benefit to preventing direct downloads into Program Files in case of trojans and other malware, but I don't understand why they had to escalate the security measures for this action instead of just giving the familiar allow/deny menu item.
-I'm just sayin....
I guess this Windows stuff is just not ready for the desktop yet.
what "smart programmers" Microsoft has.
This once again demonstrates the absolutely SHITTY coding Windows uses.
Not to mention the management morons who approved failed tests, as was claimed on a Microsoft blog last year. Obviously this is a KNOWN BUG that was ALLOWED to remain in the final release in order to make it out the door by end 2006.
And now Microsoft is inflating their sales numbers to make it look like everybody is rushing to Vista. Yeah, right, Bill. Another example of how Microsoft's only product is LIES - not software.
As for their "calculating time left" - hell, that's never worked right going back to Windows 98. Why they even bother is beyond me. Every file changes the estimated time left from "1 minute" to "2 hours". It always was bullshit and I ignore it. On one file it might work - put two files in the mix and fergeddaboutit.
It should be clear to anybody following the Vista reports that Vista is another greedy joke from Bill.
Not that XP is any better. It's TCP/IP stack is so fragile that a breeze blowing from the CPU fan corrupts it.
I had Hamachi and UltraVNC working fine for remote control of clients desktops for weeks now. I install Comodo firewall to replace the old Kerio 2.1.5 I was using, and now UltraVNC dies after fifteen minutes. I can re-establish the Hamachi connection, but UltraVNC refuses to connect until I reboot XP. Then everything works again - for ten or fifteen minutes.
So I uninstall Comodo - the logical culprit being the last installed TCP/IP connected software - and go back to Kerio.
Now UltraVNC won't connect at all.
Uninstalling Comodo appears to have hosed the XP stack. Now I have to go through all sorts of repair nonsense - with little chance of success short of a reinstall based on my previous experience with XP TCP/IP stack corruption. On Linux I would have reset the config files and fixed the problem - if in fact such a problem could even ever arise on Linux.
Windows is SHIT. Period.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This is utter and complete bullshit. just becuase your computer sucks doesnt mean its a problem with Vista. Im running two different versions (Ultimate at home, and Home Premium at work) and it isnt slower than xp. In fact the relentless bashing of Vista is getting a little old if you dont like dont use it. since installing it, my computer hasnt crashed one time, runs faster, boots faster. the only thing that i dont like is the missing button to go up one directory. other than that im impressed with it and i started on an apple IIe when i was 7 so ive been through every iteration of OS you can imagine except unix and some of the more large scale OS solutions.
I have been thinking more and more lately that Linux is going to really stake it in the home desktop market. Here are some reasons why:
I know it has been said many times before that Gnu-Linux will take over the desktop market, but I really feel it may well happen in the masses, and maybe within 5 years.
I didn't know about this bug in Vista, and it will keep me from switching over from XP until this and other problems are fixed.
The "fact" that Opera loads faster than Firefox is irrelevant. This story is Slashdot-worthy.
Make of it what you will:
New OS's more expensive versions doing better, selling faster than XP.
My ass. Leave my files alone. Get your DRM out of my PC.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A lot of /.er's seem to get so much enjoyment out of any flaw that is revealed about Windows Vista on the site even if the flaw will be addressed with the next update or two (Remember, the OS is pretty damn new). What makes it worse is that the /. gods ignite the war by posting the negative news about anything Windows; be it even the pettiest piece of news (I.E. This article). Any real techie should know that every OS has their flaws when they are first released. We already know XP is the way to go right now rather than Vista but get this: XP has been out for 6 years now! They have had enough time to perfect the OS. When Vista has been out for about a year or so, it WILL be better than XP. M$ will have no choice BUT to make it better since the adoption rate will be so high.
Another thing, Linux is not the end-all solution to everything. I understand that Linux is great (I use Ubuntu Edgy on my laptop) but it is not as user friendly as it could be (you need a damned degree in engineering just to install a software package) and the software/hardware support is just not there yet. As with Vista, give Linux a few more years when more industries start acknowledging it as an OS that is actually worth it and we will see the perfect Linux flavor.
Yours truly,
Steven a.k.a BlkMagik07
Yeah, I'd be pissed too.
You'd be drunk too?
Sounds fun, but I don't see how that solves "your friend's" driver problems. Especially after he spent "Great British Pounds Sterling Quid" on it.
A hotfix is not 'fussier to install', that makes no sense. 'Hotfix' simply means a patch that is released to fix a specific issue, rather than something like a 'Service Pack' or a security rollup or whatever - both of which are created out of a bunch of hotfixes.
If what you mean is "a hotfix that you have to get from PSS or the Download Center is more difficult to install than a hotfix that is released through Windows Update" then that would be a different sentence. The bar to release something via Windows Update / Microsoft Update is much higher as far as the number of impacted people go - though I would think that the horrible file speeds in Vista would warrant a WU post! (Oh, and all fixes posted to WU are also available through PSS and the Download Center as manually downloadable hotfixes in case you are a system administrator and want to push them out to machines you control, etc)
That line does nothing to add to the value of the description, it seems much more like a 'troll' line than anything.
The hotfix (link) for this problem is posted in that technet thread if you look on page 4, so you don't have to ask "mother may I" to Microsoft, to get it.
get new renters of Vista to contact the 'mothership' for the hotfix. WGA at its finest folks. There is no way something this basic could be a problem for an OS that is built on top of a sever OS (Server 2k3). They keep out doing themselves with sneaky tactics like this. I bet the bug is time triggered and they had the fix even before Vista hit the market. DID ANYBODY HAVE THIS PROBLEM WITH THE ALPHAS AND BETAS? Duh. Use your heads.
Will Linux ever mature? I hope so because I really don't want a Mac. =l
The machine in question came with Vista. It's about to get a new hard disk and an OS _upgrade_ to XP. As far as I'm concerned, Vista is badly broken.
I *was* running vista on this machine here (inspiron 6400), I also noticed copying files is extremely slow, But the biggest problem I have is that the operating system is not stable! it constantly randomly locked up, no mouse movement, and caps lock wouldnt turn off or on... not only that after it did that it would do it on boot another 3 times on average, then sometimes when it would let me back into windows the SYSTEM process (nt kernel) would chew 50% of CPU time (dual core system) no apps open and a hard power off is all thats possible when it gets like this (mutex lock i was thinking?) So you think slow copying of files is an issue... hahahahaha.. dream on ;)
I also noticed the 2time i formatted, vista didnt install drivers for NIC, sound, wireless, video (x1400) or the modem... 1st and 3rd time it installed all of them.
Whats more, when i decided i was going back to XP, it crashed 5 times while I was trying to copy my files back off it. The most interesting thing about this, is that it was stable for the first few days... and sometimes it would be stable for 24hours or so, then just start crashing again. It never seemed to do it on the same apps.
Just another part of the Windows Vista experience!
Thank you microsoft!!
obOfftopic: Wonder when someone will release a Vista-Lite with all the extra crap (processes / services) stripped out?
Windows XP. It's out today.
Serious design related perormance issues with fundamental file operations are not "little twitches". Reading and writing and arithmetic are what computers do for a living. If reading and writing are too much of a struggle for Vista. Chuck it into the trash, I say.
Pardon my ignorance, I'm not a Windows user for quite ages, but would not switching to some Vista Server edition (if it is or will be available) solve the problem?
If we suspect correctly that Digital Restriction Management is the culprit of bad performance, it should not be a problem on server editions because including it on servers would realy hurt server performance, hurt benchmarks and generaly hurt Windows server sales.
It is (or would be) for Microsoft a though choice IMO:
hany
... be a very good fan of Skynet or Robocop ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
There are a number of points on the file copying. I have been troubleshooting a VPN for a customer who insists that the remote office should "be able to work in exactly the same way as though they are in the main office". Never mind that the VPN bandwidth (before contention) is 256k v 100M i.e 1/400th!
The real problem in this situation is XP Pro to Windows 2003 server (SBS 2003). Copying a few megabytes of files usually fails, but is mostly fine using FTP (before a Windows server security patch stopped the FTP server authenticating correctly).
So I did a lot of digging around. File copy on Windows is actually built on top of SMB (Server Messaging Block) and this appears to have a keep-alive that must happen in a 1 second window after 32 seconds i.e. betweem 32 and 33 second intervals. Of course, latency goes up as the bandwidth can no longer handle these files, and as the latency climbs, guess what - the keep-alive is missed and Windows Explorer believes that it has lost the networked disk drive.
What does it do then? Well, it starts scanning to see what disks it has, and rebuilds the directory structure, thus adding to the traffic that caused the problem in the first place.
There are special expensive hardware boxes you can buy that fake the keep-alives to allow files structures across higher latency networks, but most of us are not in that league.
Does this relate to the Vista problem?
1) Vista uses an IPv6 native TCP stack (IPv6 is an option to install on XP and 2003)
2) How integrated are the local and remote file operations? Where does the system determine that it is local rather than over the network? If this is done at a lower level, then is SMB effectively being used even for local file operations?
If there is any level of integration, then the change to IPv6 may have something to do with the problem.
3) I had a customer where I build them a really fast machine; worked a treat, network and all. Then they sent it back, complaining it was real slow. But it wasn't - they had put a poor wireless USB stick into it with not the correct version of the drivers. Take this out, and the performance was back.
Is it possible to test some of this?
One test is to try disabling your network - safe mode would be the best - and see if the copy is fast then.
My own suspicion is that the generation of all the extra metadata is slowing the system down, and thus causing timing problems within the file operations, and the integration of local and network file operations is then compounding the problem.
This may be a wild guess, but is probably more productive than slagging Vista off. I suppose it depends if you want a solution.
By the way, anyone loving old systems - try running them under Virtual PC or Virtual server - they may be fast, but I had great difficulty trying to remember how to actually use Windows 3, and it was the only OS that gave me problems under Virtual server.