Slow file copying in Windows Vista
February 25th, 2007 | General, Technology |I’ve had my gripes with Vista before. Still I came to the conclusion at that point that I could live with Vista’s shortcomings because the interface is pretty. I know that’s kind of juvenile but still. Now I’m changing my mind. I’m slow close to switching back to XP now. Just copying files is ridiculous.
Vista takes an age to do even some of the smallest file copy operations.
I thought it was just my own machine at first, it has a few years under it’s belt but I know for certain copying files was faster on my home pc under XP than it is now with Vista. I mentioned it to a friend of mine during the week who has Vista running on a brand spanking new laptop with a really hot spec. He still noticed the same problem. Also after a little digging I’ve found loads of people have the same problem but there’s no sign of an explanation let alone a solution.
If anyone knows anything about this I’d love to hear from you, because this has me stumped. And very annoyed.
Update:
Many people have reported good results from disabling Remote Differential Compression. To do this go to Control Panel / Add Remove Programs / Turn off Windows features -> Untick Remote Differential Compression.
Thanks to Tarique Naseem for the tip.
Although Windows Vista is recommended by various PC users, some of them are not happy with the file copying speed offered by the software. Undoubtedly, Microsoft computers software has been regarded as the outstanding in every field and its web server software has always been stable on Windows based computers. However, it can not be guaranteed as to which complex module of the commerce software such as tax software can go well with the specialized needs of some users because of the huge number of variables involved as is the case with almost every piece of finance software. With the incredible potential of the Internet, it is exceedingly easy to download software which has made it a must to have an updated copy of norton antivirus to remain up and running all the time and sufficient software patents to be in place.
February 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am
The bones of 20 minutes to copy a few episodes of prison break over to the iPod…. some disaster. (Fully USB2.0 as well)
February 27th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
We’re having problems with Vista LAN file copies as well. 500k max throughput on the 100M LAN.
XP - P4 / 2GB / 100M NIC
Vista - DuoCore e6700 / 4GB / 10M WLESS
No matter what we do throughput is less than 1Mbps… ouch!
March 1st, 2007 at 7:59 am
I’m having the same problem on my brand new laptop.
“CALCULATING” (USELESS??!?!?!?)
Don’t count on that to be fixed because Vista is a next-gen os optimized for next-gen hardware. Don’t forget that hard drives haven’t really performed that much better in the past years, compared to other components.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:28 am
Elbsoljah, next-gen or not, there’s no excuse for copying files to be so slow. Especially on your brand new laptop.
March 8th, 2007 at 1:38 am
i just notice the same thing on a newly installed Vista Business. It takes hours to copy 5 Gig of data onto a network share.
BUT here is the kicker, if u do the same task but run it from any other non-vista machine it takes about 25 mins. So …… i dont know how to explain this , i mean the files are still being copied from the same Vista machine to the network but for some reason it makes no sense why it would run ‘normal’ if u copy the same folder from other machine, make sense to anyone?
March 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Tony, that really is so strange. I can’t think of any reason for that to happen. There is no excuse for performance like that on a new OS. It really does look like MS have taken one step forward in terms of design and two steps back in terms of performance.
March 9th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I had the same problem. Drove me nuts. However, I found some info on Remote Differential Compression. Turned this off and that seemed to solve the problem! To do this go to Control Panel / Add Remove Programs / Turn off Windows features -> Untick Remote Differential Compression. See if that helps.
March 12th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Hope turning off this remote differential compression voodoo helps. I just blew 7 hours trying to copy 120Gb of data from one disk to another (so I can format the original), and to top it off, it failed to copy some files. Two things I cannot believe… 1. That Microsoft let this insanely annoying flaw out the door. 2. Why they haven’t fixed it yet.
March 13th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
I am also having the same issue and I turned off the RDC but still get the same result. 5M/s on network transfers over Gb network. Ouch. Vista so far = Blue Sceens, hangs and crashes. Seems like MS to me! I think RC1 was actually a little more stable. Can anyone else think of any company in the world that can put out products that don’t work properly, but still make BILLIONS doing it? If so, please let me know because I want in on it…
March 13th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I’ve tried disabling the Remote Differential Compression myself, and though it may improve network transfers as some people are reporting, Vista still takes ages to simply copy files from one disk to another on my local machine, that I can’t explain. It was much faster under XP.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Tarique Naseem’s advise of turning off Remote Differential Compression is fantastic. A slow responding sluggish computer on a local network has now returned to the speed I used get from Windows XP. I do not understand why this simple suggestion is not more readily available and why Microsoft cannot offer the same advice or even untick this option particularly in the early days!
March 16th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
we did try adding ip address range in antivirus .. did fixed it
well Remote Differential Compression does do the job
March 16th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
We added ip address range in antivirus to fix it
March 16th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
I had some success using ROBOCOPY instead of COPY , you may try that. I have not tried turning off RDCompression. There is still something missing from this equation. I was able to get 300 M/Min seep under Vista when i was just trying different things but now i dont know what i did to get that speed
Its back to few M per min.
IP Range for any built-in antiviris or? as i dont have any antivirus installed on Vista yet.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Hi guys.
Do the following:
Trun Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level off:
To disable it, run: “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled”
To enable it, run: “netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal”
(Both these last two should be run from an Administrator Command Prompt, not a “normal” command prompt).
Found it at :
http://www.neillans.co.uk/?p=165
Hope it helps.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
On my new laptop running Vista I was getting pathetic file copy times. If you can believe the numbers that are reported by the copy process it was 20 bytes per second or less.
I downloaded a free Windows Explorer replacement called Free Commander. It seems to work fine on Vista and the copy time seems to be “normal” / fast. Thus, it seems that the problem is related to the copy process used by Windows Explorer and not related to the operating system or all the Vista security stuff.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I had the same results initially as well, and with the help of a lot of other people I knew having the same problem, we found another culprit.
The differential compression definately slows things down, no questions there.
But, the file copies were still slow, and (we confirmed this from multiple people) copying a large amount of files slowed down the system even more, and eventually would crash explorer with an out of memory error. (Aprox 16 thousand files will do it.. easy to do as a programmer moving source files around)
Using something aside from Explorer would bypass this issue. (I used Directory Opus)
Turns out it’s NOT Vista at fault.. what we all had in common was Kaspersky antivirus/firewall. (I prefer NOD32 and ZoneAlarm myself but with Vista your choices are seriously limited at the moment)
After uninstalling it (disabling didn’t fix it) the system’s performance improved tremendously, and didn’t mem-leak itself into oblivion.
This was confirmed by a bunch of others on a usenet newsgroup for Vista.
I don’t know if they’ve fixed this issue has been fixed yet, but it’s definitely Kaspersky at fault.
That being said.. I’m back with XP. Faster, more reliable, and runs everything. I may give Vista another go after they release their first service pack, and the driver support is better.. but for now.. ehh its pretty but they can keep it.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Jen,
I don’t use Kaspersky, I use AVG although I hadn’t tried removing that as a possible solution. I’ve given up in the end and got myself a lovely new iMac instead and I’ll be reinstalling XP on my pc just in case I need a Windows environment for anything. To be honest though I can’t see myself ever needing a pc again. I should have made the switch years ago.
April 8th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
There’s also a known bug in Vista that can cause this. See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770
June 6th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Having same problem as the others. Vista is too slow despite having a powerful and spangking new laptop .Did everything as suggested but nothing works. this vista is rubbish. I’ll go back to XP as it is more efficient. No thanks to vista team
June 20th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
[...] full of bugs as is expected of Microsoft software. Performance is worse when compared to XP. A simple Copy and Paste on Vista takes ages, it’s a joke. I’ve seen Vista running on brand new machines with very good spec and yet [...]
September 12th, 2007 at 7:31 am
i had the same problem too until i used a program called Teracopy (Someone recommended it), its a freeware home version, no more problem anymore, fastest copyinh/moving speed, looks even faster than Xp
January 9th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
LOL - Tried to turn off Remote Diff Compression, but when I get to the “Turn Windows Features On/Off” box it just sits there and says “Please Wait”. 12 mins and counting … sigh. The hell with this, I’m gonna install Ubuntu.