Vista slow at copying files

[nukenorman]

I am unzipping a file on my Hard Drive that is 515 megs. My hard drive is WD 120gig 7200rpm. P4 2.4 ghz processor and 512 ram. On windows xp I could unzip a file like this within minutes or even a minute. On windows vista it took 1 hour and 45 min to unzip a file that was only 515 megs.

What the heck is going on? Why does it take so long? This vista is annoying.

[destined1ne]

vista itself uses more ram, so maybe ram's the issue here... 512mb is pretty low

[Robin.B]

I zip/rar and unzip/unrar huge (over 3GB) files all the time and haven't ever noticed a speed difference from XP. It isn't a general problem with Vista at all.

[Iluvatar]

I am unzipping a file on my Hard Drive that is 515 megs. My hard drive is WD 120gig 7200rpm. P4 2.4 ghz processor and 512 ram. On windows xp I could unzip a file like this within minutes or even a minute. On windows vista it took 1 hour and 45 min to unzip a file that was only 515 megs.

What the heck is going on? Why does it take so long? This vista is annoying.

I have noticed this too, in all the betas and RTM. We were told that this wouldnt be an issue in the RTM but I still see it.

In fact in my setup I am seeing hard drive performance in general decreased over XP especially in multitask cases where one program is writing constant data and other programs are trying to access at the same time. I get stalls now where in XP it seemed to be more graceful with this issue.

[AJerman]

That's weird. I would have originally suggested that it might be lack of system drivers, but if it's THAT slow it sounds like something more. I've had no problems that bad, but my overall drive performance is a little slower until nvidia finally releases drivers.

[DarkWader]

This is true. I tryed unrar'ing files with RTM. And it was very slow compared to XP

Even I have 2GB ram and 3 SATAII disks in raid-0.

[AltecXP]

flys on my laptop ..no slower then XP @ all. i have a 5400 hdd, 1GB DDR2 667, and 1.67 centrino duo

[GaBMaTrIx]

It was very slow for me too, copying a LOT of files from one partition to another.

I think I tried stopping the service called Superfetch and it resolved my problem.

Will test some more later but maybe you could try that.

[windupbird]

I am so glad I am not the only one seeing this problem. I am running RC2 - so that could be my problem, but unzipping files is extremely slow... Just took me about 10 minutes to unzip a 100MB file. Ungodly... I am running on a 3.0GHz P4 with 2GB ram - Dell Dimension 9150. Should be blazing... uhgg...

[basques]

I got the same problem on RTM version. My guess is, its because vista tries to index the files each time you try to copy/move it. It reads the meta-tags, and creates the Thumb images for the files, which is absolutely unnecessary if your only goal is to move/copy the file.

You can try this by moving some files which need external codecs to index, such as ogm, or mkv video files. If you try to move those files, you can see the codecs getting loaded one by one on the systemtray, which makes it even slower to copy compared to other file types.

[Gurra]

I have same slow network and copy speed, i seems that the drivers is not mature yet.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Hmm interesting - the copy engine in the Vista shell is actually significantly faster in most cases than XP (in many cases even faster than the command line copy functions).

[etfong]

i've also experienced this slow response on the RC and earlier builds. So far RTM seems to be good.

[Menge]

Hmm interesting - the copy engine in the Vista shell is actually significantly faster in most cases than XP (in many cases even faster than the command line copy functions).

in synthetic benchmarks or something of the kind? cause last time i tried the retail version of Vista it was pretty slow :| might've been placebo. but damn it sure took long. either it really is slow or microsoft's research into making the user think that a process is going faster was totally bogus :p

[:: Lyon ::]

Same here.. it's kinda slow..

Last time in RC2, it's even slower if you are going into a compressed .zip file, copying the whole files (let's say 500-ish files inside the zip) and then pasting it outside

For some people, note that Vista has already started copying, even though it's still saying "Estimating time remaining"..it confused me last time as I was thinking it's taking so long to even start copying

[Andareed]

Hmm interesting - the copy engine in the Vista shell is actually significantly faster in most cases than XP (in many cases even faster than the command line copy functions).

Can you elaborate on why this would be the case?

[P.M.K]

Could it be WinZip or WinRar that's the problem??

[Mr. Gibs]

Disable the service called SuperFetch, some people say it improves hard disk performance.

SuperFetch was designed for hybrid drives.

Edited December 19, 2006 by Shadowdruid

[Lasker]

Disable the service called SmartFetch, some people say it improves hard disk performance.

SmartFetch was designed for hybrid drives.

there is no services called "SmartFetch" there is one called "SuperFetch"

[Mr. Gibs]

oops, i meant superfetch. My bad :(

[Express]

Is your unzip process running in background mode?

In Vista, when the target process is in background mode, its CPU, page, and I/O priorities are reduced.

I/O perf depends a lot on the application reads/writes to the disk. (Buffer sizes, sync/async IO etc.)

Try a different unzip program and see if it makes a difference.

[:: Lyon ::]

Well not using winzip or winrar,, I was talking about the built-in engine

Double click on a zip file, see the files inside..select all of them, cut and paste it somewhere else..

[thollian]

I am having this same issue (RTM)....when copying any files....I have disabled superfetch now and will see if that helps....

[UnaBonger]

Same problem here... Very slow copying files between machines or partitions...

[norseman]

I was able to unrar and unzip files downloaded from bittorrent that are 4.7gb in size and they did not take any exceedingly long time at all.. Vista RTM on the system in my sig.