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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.
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
Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?
MS is pretty much mistaken when they thought people will blindly go for Vista when all they could offer as an improvement from XP was transparent windows. Bleh.
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.
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.
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.
I've quite enjoyed how the 'estimating time remaining' message doesn't go away before the operation is done in some cases even though its taking over 10 seconds to copy a file.
Incidentally, copying from a Samba share over the network seems fairly snappy, but I haven't measured it, I don't personally own a Vista machine; it was a client's.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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.
Where you running an anti-virus programme? I've had similar issues with just this operation with XP and Win 2K (Not used a Vista machine yet) if McAfee's on-access scan capability was enabled. Might be worth checking?
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".
While it's very true that ext3 (for example) in Linux is way faster at copying than NTFS in XP, this particular issue with Vista shouldn't be with the filesystem - it uses the same NTFS that XP uses (at least, I'm able to read/write Vista NTFS partitions from within XP...)
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Now, wait a sec here. Confirmed? :)
There have been a lot of issues regarding upgraded XPs when it comes to user access rights (or, clean Vista installations with additional partitions/disks).
If you move/copy a file or folder that has old XP rights (where Vista cannot find the owner or believe the user access information is be corrupt) the whole menagerie of stuff kicks in. Windows Defender, UAC, Indexing, you name it. This will of course have impact on performance.
I thought this whole "Vista is slow to copy" was well documented?
I've had the slow copy crap too, when I first attached an old HDD with old XP shared folders and whatnot, but disabling UAC and changing user rights on folders and files removed the problem.
Now .. If I only could remove the 4-5 requesters when copying I'd be happy. >.
/* Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana */
A vague comparison - 221MB over 124 files, from a 5400rpm laptop drive to a 7200rpm, Firewire 400 external disk. 10.43 seconds, an average of 21.2MB/s.
Shouldn't you be getting better performance from such spangly disks? This is a MacBook Pro, running MacOS X 10.4.9. I'll do another test with the same files, same disks and same hardware but with Windows XP later.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I'll bet they've added some more fricking metadata...They spent all that work trying to come up with a database filesystem...You know they didn't just toss all of that code. Also, they have all that "search your hard drive" functionality built in to compete with spotlight, so it has to index and categorize files, etc, etc, so your searches seem quick and responsive.
Just a bunch of bloat. Move the bits first, then go back and do the rest of that stuff during system slack time, but Windows does everything on the fly...Or on the crawl, as it were.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So Vista doesnt quite work as its supposed to but its excellent nonetheless, you paid for this thing? If i pay money for a product and it doesnt function correctly i will complain to the manufacturer, i find it fascinating that people are over the moon with Windows Vista, having coughed up large sums of money for it, when the best they can say about the thing is that it almost works.
/. dominated by FUD about vista, at the same time i think its important that people planning an upgrade can see what they are in for.
While i dont want to see
As for me, ill stick with linux...
Software Freedom Day!.
Try OSX. But seriously, I turn off most of the "glitz" even on XP, because it slows me down enough to be very annoying. And this is on a machine that should easily be able to run Vista (256MB 7900 nVidia graphics card and dual core ~5000+ AMD CPU w/ 2GB RAM) I'd do the same with OSX, but for some reason, OSX's interface isn't annoyingly slowed down by the prettiness.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
E6600 (Dual core 2.40) / 2G / Vista ultimate. Even a single file of under 1mb can take several seconds. However, I've noticed that this doesn't seem to happen if you're copying files in your own space, ie: desktop / documents folder / pictures folder / etc. However, copying a file from your own space to either a network drive of (heaven forbid) into your c: or somewhere else on the system, there seems to be a stupidly slow amount of time.
Sometimes it also seems that another process asking for UAC rights will completely stop a copy. I had one where I was copying a small file around and it took literally five minutes before I cancelled it, then I noticed that a program I was installing was asking for UAC rights. Not sure if they were related.
This definately isn't an issue of copying a million 1 byte files slowing the sytem down. This is copying a single 600k file around taking 20-30 seconds of 'caculating' and then it copies it.
I can understand that there's a lot of extra crap going on in the background with checking DRM rights, file permissions, ACLs, etc, but come on, programs are supposed to get faster as they come along, not slower.
obOfftopic: Wonder when someone will release a Vista-Lite with all the extra crap (processes / services) stripped out?
All versions of NT (including Vista) will label the first active partition as C, even if it's not the system/install partition.
/dev/hda1 partition formatted ext3, and install grub on it. The grub config file sets the correct partition active, and boots each of my Windows installs. I haven't tried writing to ext3 partitions yet from within Windows, but will need to at some point so that I can change the default boot OS via RDP :D
I boot from a Knoppix DVD before installing NT and hide all partitions (set type to something Windows doesn't understand) except the install one, and make that the only active partition. Then I reboot, install, then boot back in to Knoppix to fdisk the partitions back to normal. Benefit of this is that each Windows install is stand-alone and resides on drive C! If you reinstall one of the other partitions, or restore a Ghost image of another partition, you don't affect the booting of the other installs.
Before Vista and its new boot manager it was easy to edit boot.ini on the active partition and have it do the multi-booting. Now I make a small (e.g. 150MB)