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Bug Operating Systems Software Windows

Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files 494

Posted by kdawson from the how-many-million? dept.
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.
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Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files More

Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files

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  • Confirmed! (Score:5, Informative)

    by yoyhed ( 651244 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:06AM (#18499625)
    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! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Vengeance ( 46019 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:26AM (#18499803)
      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! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hobo sapiens ( 893427 ) <POLLOCK minus painter> on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @09:48AM (#18501327) Journal

        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?

        The way you wrote that, you were asking for a flamebait mod.

        However, I agree with you in spirit. I was helping a friend transfer files from an XP machine to her new Vista machine. I noticed file transfer was extremely slow (was glad to see this article, I thought it was me). Yada yada.

        The real mind blower for me, though, was more in line with your post. The simple act of inserting my thumb drive caused explorer to lock up for a while (assuming this, since the taskbar, all other windows, etc, were inoperable). It locked up for about 2 minutes the first time, then after that it would lock up for about ten seconds each time I inserted the drive, thus preventing preventing me from doing anything. As I waited in in front of my friend's PC, totally exasperated, I was quite bemused by the fact that her sidebar was clicking along perfectly. The slideshow was reloading a new picture every few seconds, the transition effects were working perfectly, he analog clock was working, etc.

        So there you go -- while it doesn't validate the flamie-ness of your post, it does vindicate your point at least anecdotally. Vista seems to be designed to protect the flashy useless crap at the expense of core tasks (like, you know, explorer). If a task like explorer is having trouble, then resources should be diverted from other resources to help. Or, core tasks should bullet-proof. Or, MS should have concentrated on core tasks rather than flashy widgets like the sidebar. I dunno, but something seemed to be a bit mis-prioritized.

    • Re:Confirmed! (Score:5, Informative)

      by whathappenedtomonday ( 581634 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:37AM (#18499885) Journal
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MikeBabcock ( 65886 )
        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.

      • Re:Confirmed! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:03AM (#18500093)
        Bottom line: file operations in Vista suck, even if your HD is fast and you have lots of RAM.

        My question is: for all users, or some...? I really doubt this happens everywhere, I had the Vista RC2 until recently on my modest machine and copying/moving was as fast as on XP (i.e. normal).

        Generalizing that in Vista these are slow kinda skews the issue: quite possibly this is not just unfixable bloat, but is caused by something specific and will be fixed in the coming weeks.

        • Obligatory old reference (Score:5, Funny)

          by BeerCat ( 685972 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @02:18PM (#18505741) Homepage
          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) [kottke.org]

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by 0123456789 ( 467085 )
        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?
        • Yes, I am using AVG; as I said I didn't really investigate this, but I doubt that the AV was interfering while copying jpgs and pngs (no exe files in the zip archive). I guess it has to do with the Windows unzip mechanism / temp folders and the fact that I copied from the C partition to the Vista D (in Vista it is still named C!) partition, but I'm reluctant to boot Vista just to re-test the copying. Next time I have to boot it, I'll do a few tests and see if I can replicate the problem.

          Still, this was amo

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Malc ( 1751 )
            All versions of NT (including Vista) will label the first active partition as C, even if it's not the system/install partition.

            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 o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Malc ( 1751 )
        Are you running the final release? I saw this behaviour on one of the pre-releases, but not the final version. It can take a while to get going on directory copies over the network - I assumed it was scanning all of the files first as it seems to know in advance how many files you might end up over-writing.

      • I just tried (Score:5, Interesting)

        by iceperson ( 582205 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:26AM (#18500321)
        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! (Score:5, Funny)

      by drooling-dog ( 189103 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:57AM (#18500027)
      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: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
      I wasn't planning on moving to Vista any time soon, and the longer I wait, the better my current XP installation seems.

      Apart from eye-candy I can do without, what new features does Vista have?

      Windows' main competitive edge over Linux/OSX is the simple reality that it had virtually no DRM, making it eays for consumers to use cracked applications. (I'm not saying piracy is okay, just that it is a fact of life and a primary reason why Windows is so popular). If MicroSoft do a good enough job at DRM, they will

    • Re:Confirmed! (Score:5, Funny)

      by dosquatch ( 924618 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:36AM (#18500435) Journal
      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ninjeratu ( 794457 )
      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

  • Why only a Hotfix and no patch? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:09AM (#18499643) Journal
    For very very basic functionality?

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

  • Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Alioth ( 221270 )
    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 :-)
    • That's not the last post, there's another page.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's a trap. A real Microsoft fanboy would have told people to use Windows Live Search.
    • The reason a lot of Linux users will tell new users to google it or RTFM is because of cost. Linux is free in a lot of ways, and one of them is monetary. While you dont pay for it with cash, you pay for it with little or no support. You should be prepared to search for answers online and in the manual. The difference with Vista, is that you paid for it. With paying should come support for the product. Telling customers to look else ware is not a good idea. They may find more than the answer, and maybe the w

  • WTF Register quote? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:11AM (#18499657)
    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.

    • Re:WTF Register quote? (Score:5, Funny)

      by vrt3 ( 62368 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:39AM (#18500457) Homepage

      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"

      Note the small m and b: it's not 256 megabyte, but 256 millibit. That's not a whole lot of memory.

  • Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses (Score:4, Informative)

    by N8F8 ( 4562 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:13AM (#18499673)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by martin ( 1336 )
      the hibernate issue is well known and documented. There are several ways that MIGHT fix this, I'll leave this as an exercise to find the links ;-)

    • Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kevinadi ( 191992 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:26AM (#18499805)
      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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:30AM (#18499837)

        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!!

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      Actually, according to these people [nature.com], swimming in molasses should be about as fast as swimming in water. They won the Ig-Nobel Award [wikipedia.org] for Chemistry in 2005 for that work, too.

  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:14AM (#18499681)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      half the new kids won't even get it

    • Insightful?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by jimicus ( 737525 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:43AM (#18499929)
      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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:16AM (#18499705) Journal
    Hey, They stole my stuff. My code takes very long time to do trivial tasks. That is my idea. They stole my idea!

  • DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ehaggis ( 879721 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:18AM (#18499725) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • The point was, Vista is making all files hard to copy.... including copyrighted ones. Perhaps they've found a way around Schneier's statements, eh?

    • Re:DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MORB ( 793798 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:03AM (#18500089)
      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.

  • News to me (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mdboyd ( 969169 )
    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.

  • I can attest to this... (Score:5, Funny)

    by GFree ( 853379 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:38AM (#18499891)
    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!)

  • Hotfix versus patch? (Score:4, Informative)

    by kiwimate ( 458274 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:48AM (#18499967) Journal
    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?
    • Well, for alot of people, a proper patch installs itself... while a hotfix requires manually running it.
      Even if it is manual, with a hotfix you have to download a file, and run it. People constantly download files and don't know where they went, and get frustrated.

      Also, if a patch comes along later that replaces the same file, but doesn't address this issue, you may have to reapply the hotfix. (Though I think I've only seen this with Service Packs, not patches)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by boarsai ( 698361 )

      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.
      Why should you have to ring up to get the damned thing functioning properly? Seems like an annoying and pointless waste of time to me... which sounds oddly enough like the actual problem! Guess they do some things well eh.

  • Slow deletions and standby problems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theinfobox ( 188897 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:57AM (#18500023) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • It's just plain slow...period (Score:3, Informative)

    by PenguinBoyDave ( 806137 ) <`david' `at' `davidmeyer.org'> on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:58AM (#18500039)
    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...

  • How is this a surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Critical_ ( 25211 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @07:59AM (#18500043) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Mysterious X ( 903554 ) <adam@omega.org.uk> on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:00AM (#18500055)
    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.

  • Seen it before: Windows vs OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hyperhaplo ( 575219 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:04AM (#18500101)
    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'.

    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 :) or simply not use Explorer (I did try a few explorer replacement programs. Now I just queue the files and wait).

    Any suggestions welcome. Yes, I have googled.

    Lets not even start on trying to network XP "professional" with XP "home". *argl*
  • I'm terribly unhappy with Vista. I was pretty much forced to get it when I bought my most recetn laptop. No XP choice was available for the lappy that I wanted.

    It is slow. It is a pain. And no, it isn't because I'm old. And yes, I'm willing to learn new stuff. It's because it just doesn't work. I see errors, it's slow, and it isn't any real improvement over XP from a GUI or user experience point of view. Blah!
  • Wonder how this'll affect the server variants. It would just be funny as heck if Microsoft died in the server market because they had to put in all this DRM nonsense.

  • My simple results (Score:5, Informative)

    by DnemoniX ( 31461 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @08:14AM (#18500201)
    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 )

      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.

      A vague comparison - 221MB over 124 files, from a 5400rpm laptop drive to

  • Skip the eye candy and it will be faster (Score:3, Informative)

    by worldcitizen ( 130185 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @10:31AM (#18501875)
    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.

  • Can we all calm down? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Some_Llama ( 763766 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @12:11PM (#18503257) Homepage Journal
    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?

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