Slow copying

[Geo]

Since installing Vista Home Premium copying files from one hard drive to
another seems to takes forever. A 20meg file in XP would copy instant, but
with Vista it goes through all this calculating time crap and then it can
take up to 10 seconds to copy.

I have installed the patch Windows6.0-KB931770-x64.msu but that does not
help.

 

[Richard Urban]

Things have not changed much since Windows 3.1 where a knowledgeable person
would install a REAL file manager program on their computer to handle file
management chores.

People have been complaining here for many months about this condition. For
many months I have been telling them to use Total Commander - a ***REAL***
file manager. The fellow has been developing this for over ten years now and
it is as good as they get. I paid for it once over 10 years ago and have
gotten every upgrade since at no extra cost.

Suggest you try it! Get it at http://www.ghisler.com/

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Since installing Vista Home Premium copying files from one hard drive to
another seems to takes forever. A 20meg file in XP would copy instant,
but with Vista it goes through all this calculating time crap and then it
can take up to 10 seconds to copy.

I have installed the patch Windows6.0-KB931770-x64.msu but that does not
help.

It depends how you are copying the file. If you move the file by drag-n-drop
in Explorer, it will take a lot longer than by using a copy command at the
command prompt.

If you copy the file using a plain "copy" command, it will give you an idea
of how long Windows itself takes to copy the file. The copy command is a
thin shim on top of Win32 CopyFile() API. If you copy the file in
Explorer, there are many, many layers of code on top of the base copy, which
need to get executed. This slows down the performance of the copy, often
dramatically (copying a large number of small files in explorer, takes mush
longer than the same volume of data as a few large files). The Explorer
shell queries each file for icon resources, makes COM calls to Shell
libraries to get file properties (passed as complex structures)
for each file etc. Basically, Explorer is oriented towards giving a rich,
featureful user experience - even at the expense of raw performance. Whether
this is a good idea or not, in this age of massive media files, is an open
question ... personally I'd like to see performance ramped up a little bit,
but optimising code as complex as Explorer would not be easy.

When I need to move large amounts of data - anything over a gigabyte - I
usually do it via a command line, rather than drag-n-drop. When copying
between disks on the same machine, a "copy" command is fine. For anything
over a network, I always use the robocopy command. This was a Resource Kit
tool in Windows Server 2003, but moved into the core OS in Vista and Windows
Server 2008. Robocopy is extremely efficient and resilient under even crappy
network conditions.

Cheers
Andrew