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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
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
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
This was likely because the uninstaller was removing each file one by one, or even verifying the contents of each file so it would only remove files that hadn't been changed. Just deleting the whole folder would have taken a lot less time.
No that guy is just keeping the low level of bug reporting that all are doing in that technet thread.
,Uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"
If you did google for the "bug" you might have come accross this
"Start >> Control Panel >> Programs and Features," Turn windows features on or off"
I think that is only for the network problems, not for the generic copy or delete problems (not sure, reports are not good)
I have seen also reports about vista that is has problems with large sparse files, but i haven't taken the time to reproduce. (will do later, but every 30 days it seems i have to evaluate windows vista again.... )
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...
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?
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.
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 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...
For those unwilling to read the forums (or who block all MS sites at their router), the problem relates to Vista making thumbnails of files, and trying to continue making them even when you have told it to delete a file, its not a transfer speed problem, and can be VERY easily stop gapped by disabling thumbnail views in the folder view settings :)
The thing I personally have a problem with in vista is folder browsing, I have not spent money on a good raid array (and made sure it had vista drivers) and lots of HDD just to have a half second pause when I double click ANY folder.
...
deltree functionality was sensibly incorporated in the rd/rmdir command a while back -- rd /s is the same as the old deltree.
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.
deltree: it's been years since I used NT, but if I remember right rd /s/q dirname should do what you're after.
The way in which it is handled in Unix in general is that the link count is decremented. When the link count is decremented to 0, the file can no longer be accessed, as in new requests. However, the system keeps the file open and the blocks marked as in use until the last application with the file open lets go of it. Then the blocks are marked free. If the system goes down while a process is still holding the file open, and thus the blocks are marked as being in use, you will need to fsck to free those blocks for use. Journaling filesystems worth using will figure it out for themselves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"