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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.

4 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses by kevinadi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. How is this a surprise? by Critical_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. I just tried by iceperson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

  4. Re:Confirmed! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.