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.

Confirmed!

[yoyhed (651244)]

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.

Re:Confirmed!

[Vengeance (46019)]

Egads, what a piece of JUNK.

What in the *hell* is the point of a pretty interface for your operating system, when it won't carry out basic operating system tasks efficiently?

Of course, I'm not *really* asking this question, since we all know that the point of Windows upgrades isn't to improve our experience, but to drive the purchase of new hardware, that will require new software, that will drive Microsoft's numbers up. That being said, this sort of thing is just completely unacceptable. Copying files is amongst the most basic things a computer can be asked to do.

Re:Confirmed!

[whathappenedtomonday (581634)]

5-10 seconds? That's really fast! Try this on a dual boot system with 2 partitions, XP on C and Vista on D: double click a ZIP file on your XP partition from inside Vista and copy the files inside the ZIP to your Vista D partition (which shows up as C anyway). I got a whopping 8-30 bytes per second that way recently and waited about 10 minutes for a few images to crawl from the XP partition ZIP temp folder to the Vista partition. I didn't try if copying the zip to the Vista partition first would speed things up, but I guess it would have helped a little.

Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.

I just tried

[iceperson (582205)]

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".

Re:Confirmed!

[drooling-dog (189103)]

Moving/copying a lot of large files is very suspicious behavior. The compliant and well-behaved user who leaves things where they are supposed to be should only rarely have to do that. Perhaps Microsoft is slowing down the process to give you time to reflect on the error of your ways (or maybe to think about switching to a different OS)...

Re:Confirmed!

[dosquatch (924618)]

Attempting to delete large numbers of files under XP sets one up to wait quite a while for the OS while it is "preparing to delete", and Vista makes this slower? WTF is "preparing to delete", anyway? Does it really take that long to generate an "Are you sure?" dialog?

Re:Confirmed!

[yoyhed (651244)]

This just in! An extremely common and necessary file operation takes about 10 times longer to do in Vista on the exact same hardware! Trust me, it's _really_ annoying. Oh, and this is Slashdot, of course there will be an article about every little thing ;-)

Re:Confirmed!

[Gr8Apes (679165)]

With something so basic and fundamental, yes, it will be reported on /. It indicates MS completely blew QA on Vista, which isn't surprising since they were going to ship in Jan come hell or high water. Another delay was absolutely not acceptable, as Vista delays have already made them a laughing stock among some, and more importantly was shaking confidence in others.

I think we will see that rushing out an incomplete and untested product is a sure way remove confidence. Evidently MS hasn't learned from their "only use odd-numbered service packs" mantra that used to exist among many of us. Why was that? Because the odd numbered SPs fixed the issues of the even numbered SPs, including the initial release.

Re:Confirmed!

[databyss (586137)]

I have this problem on Vista and it's not so much that it's unusual... it's more mind boggling.

I confuses me deeply... I hadn't thought to associate it with content protection. Now it's simply aggravating.

Copying a few files, no matter what the size, pops up a "Calculating transfer time" window... I'm talking files where the total sum is 10MB even. It's unnecessary.

The transfer itself will often go faster then the calculation. Apparently the calculation is doing more than just figuring out file transfer size.

Why only a Hotfix and no patch?

[jkrise (535370)]

For very very basic functionality?

What is Vista doing? Factoring large primes in 640KB RAM?

WTF Register quote?

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Obligatory

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Insightful?!

[jimicus (737525)]

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.

It is feature I invented

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

Hey, They stole my stuff. My code takes very long time to do trivial tasks. That is my idea. They stole my idea!

DRM?

[ehaggis (879721)]

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.

Re:DRM?

[MORB (793798)]

Well, one could naturally believe that it's slow because it checks the content of the file for possible markers that it is a file containing protected content, or something like this.

The alternative explanation is that it's slow because vista's coding sucks, which is seems just as likely but is even less flattering.

Basically, is it slow because they are evil, or because they are incompetent? Pick your poison. A file copy using the most expensive desktop OS on the market shouldn't be slow.

I can attest to this...

[GFree (853379)]

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!)

Slow deletions and standby problems

[theinfobox (188897)]

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.

How is this a surprise?

[Critical_ (25211)]

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 [wikipedia.org] 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 had this issue

[The Mysterious X (903554)]

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.

My simple results

[DnemoniX (31461)]

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...

Re:Whah?

[leuk_he (194174)]

No that guy is just keeping the low level of bug reporting that all are doing in that technet thread.

If you did google for the "bug" you might have come accross this [neowin.net]

"Start >> Control Panel >> Programs and Features," Turn windows features on or off" ,Uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"

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.... )

Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses

[kevinadi (191992)]

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.

Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses

[by Anonymous Coward]

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?

Shiny!!

Re:Interesting...

[david_g17 (976842)]

...Why is Slashdot so slow to highlight glaring defects in Vista?

Actually, slashdot reported on this months ago; however, since the slashdot server is running on vista, it took this long to get inserted into the database.