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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
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
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.
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.