Vista slow network copy

Hi All,
I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
to help.
The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
death". What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. I've
just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
current updates, and it's just the same.

I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
so slow and how to fix it. If I copy from an XP machine and push it
to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. If I logon to the Vista box
and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.

There must be a fix - anyone?

Ric

"Ric" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:40dfe3bf-f41d-4df1-92bf-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi All,
> I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
> preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
> to help.
> The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
> performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
> death". What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. I've
> just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
> current updates, and it's just the same.
>
> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> so slow and how to fix it. If I copy from an XP machine and push it
> to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. If I logon to the Vista box
> and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.
>
> There must be a fix - anyone?
>
> Ric

I find myself using OSX more and more....

I have decided on three pet hates:
i) Vista
ii) Lexmark printers
iii) Aol Broadband.

I am thinking of devising a surcharge mechanism for each of the three....

Gaz

Ric wrote:

> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> so slow

<http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx>

On 20 Jun, 13:39, "Gaz" <gaz...@msn.com> wrote:
> "Ric" <infobub...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:40dfe3bf-f41d-4df1-92bf-(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hi All,
> > I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
> > preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
> > to help.
> > The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
> > performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
> > death". *What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. *I've
> > just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
> > current updates, and it's just the same.
>
> > I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> > so slow and how to fix it. *If I copy from an XP machine and push it
> > to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. *If I logon to the Vista box
> > and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.
>
> > There must be a fix - anyone?
>
> > Ric
>
> I find myself using OSX more and more....
>
> I have decided on three pet hates:
> i) Vista
> ii) Lexmark printers
> iii) Aol Broadband.
>
> I am thinking of devising a surcharge mechanism for each of the three....
>
> Gaz- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I'd agree with all 3. I use OS X at home with an XP VM for stuff I
absolutely have to have Windows for (flashing new ROMs to phones,
mainly) but the missus needs Windows/Office for work. I could
downgrade her to XP but this seems suboptimal really. I can't believe
the file copy problems passed QC for Vista - new PC, copy data off old
one and...oh.
All the tweaks I've found online, SP1, etc etc still don't fix being
able to copy files from one place to another without hanging the
machine.
Remember when an OS was a Disk Operating System? As in, it copied
things around on disks? So much for progress.

On 20 Jun, 14:00, LR <l...@privacy.net> wrote:
> Ric wrote:
> > I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> > so slow
>
> * <http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx>

Very informative article, but the sheer volume of comments along the
lines of "so why doesn't it work, then?" don't really inspire much
confidence. It's still broken.

"Ric" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:40dfe3bf-f41d-4df1-92bf-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi All,
> I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
> preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
> to help.
> The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
> performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
> death". What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. I've
> just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
> current updates, and it's just the same.
>
> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> so slow and how to fix it. If I copy from an XP machine and push it
> to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. If I logon to the Vista box
> and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.
>
> There must be a fix - anyone?

As you know, this is a well known problem with Vista.

If you have lots of files to copy, use Robocopy instead, which has a lot of
other advantages, and is a lot faster. There is a GUI for it, but it's
mostly useful just for making scripts.

For a faster GUI drag and drop sort of solution, I am going to look into
making a custom button in Total Commander, to use Robocopy with switches to
keep timestamps intact. I have been meaning to do this for a couple of
weeks, but I should have time to experiment this weekend.

ss.

In article <40dfe3bf-f41d-4df1-92bf-
(E-Mail Removed)>, Ric says...
> Hi All,
> I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
> preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
> to help.
> The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
> performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
> death". What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. I've
> just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
> current updates, and it's just the same.
>
> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
> so slow and how to fix it. If I copy from an XP machine and push it
> to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. If I logon to the Vista box
> and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.
>
> There must be a fix - anyone?
>
Yeah..WINDOWS UPDATE. The slow network transfer fix is in an automatic
update and also in SP1.



--
Conor

I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't
looking good either. - Scott Adams

LR wrote:
> Ric wrote:
>> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
>> so slow
>
> <http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx>

Interesting, but (unless I misread) suggests it should be no worse than
XP, which could hardly be less true in my (admittedly limited)
experience of Vista.

Alex

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:14:35 -0700 (PDT), Ric put finger to keyboard
and typed:

>Hi All,
>I've seen this before and the usual suggestions of turning off icon
>preview, remote differential compression and tcp autotuning don't seem
>to help.
>The first vista machines I put in for customers had terrible, terrible
>performance copying data over the network - the "green ribbon of
>death". What took 30 seconds in XP would take hours in Vista. I've
>just got the missus a new Dell with Vista Home Premium, with all
>current updates, and it's just the same.
>
>I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
>so slow and how to fix it. If I copy from an XP machine and push it
>to a share on the Vista box, it's fine. If I logon to the Vista box
>and copy from an XP machine or my NAS, it's unusable.
>
>There must be a fix - anyone?

There's no simple fix as such. The best workaround is not to use Vista
to perform the copy - either push/pull from a non-Vista machine, or
open a command line box and do it from there.

Vista SP1 was supposed to solve it, but it doesn't really - it's a bit
better, but it's still slower than XP or non-MS OSs.

This blog post has some possibly useful information:

http://robgarrett.com/cs/blogs/softw...-copy-fix.aspx

Mark
--
Stuff, some of it good, at http://www.good-stuff.co.uk
"Nothing takes the past away like the future"

Alex Fraser wrote:
> LR wrote:
>> Ric wrote:
>>> I'm not alone in this but I've not seen a definitive guide to why it's
>>> so slow
>>
>> <http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx>
>>
>
> Interesting, but (unless I misread) suggests it should be no worse than
> XP, which could hardly be less true in my (admittedly limited)
> experience of Vista.
>
> Alex
When SP1 was released anandtech did do a write up on some of the changes
and they did make this comment
"Finally, and the reason that Microsoft believes is the root of most of
the Vista complaints, Explorer under XP cheated a bit with file copying
operations; it considered the job done once it had finished writing a
file to the write cache. Vista meanwhile doesn't consider the job done
until it is done writing the file to disk, so Vista will almost never “win""
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/sho...spx?i=3233&p=3