Slashdot Mirror
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....
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
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
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.
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.
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.... )
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.
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!)
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?
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.
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.
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 *
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 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".
deltree functionality was sensibly incorporated in the rd/rmdir command a while back -- rd /s is the same as the old deltree.
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.
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.
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?
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"