Is Vista's "slow copy" finally fixed?

BlackTiger
If you stumbled and fell down, it doesn't mean yet, that you're going in the wrong direction.

Regarding to this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770/en-us

Does it works?
Will this update be available to the public before Vista SP1 without contacting ms-support?

BlackTiger
If you stumbled and fell down, it doesn't mean yet, that you're going in the wrong direction.

http://hotfix.xable.net/download/index.php?dir=Language%20Neutral/Vista/&file=Windows6.0-KB931770-x86.msu

glebd
Turning coffee into code

The MS KB article and the hotfix do not really cover the full extent of the problem, which I, too, experienced many times. From the article:

On a Windows Vista-based computer, when you try to copy files from a server on a network, the copy process may stop responding (hang), and you may receive a message that resembles the following:

Calculating Time Remaining

0 minutes remaining

This problem may occur only occasionally.

1) the problem is not only occuring when copying files from/to a network share, but on a local disk as well;

2) the problem occurs very often if not every time, and not occasionally, as stated in the article.

It eludes me how a problem like this could have escaped QA or beta testing (word has it, some beta testers filed this problem as a bug several times). Must have been quite a rush to get the thing out of the door.

Well, at least we have a shiny animation to look at while the files are slowly being copied.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

glebd wrote:
2) the problem occurs very often if not every time, and not occasionally, as stated in the article.

It says it may occur occasionally.

Personally, I've never seen this problem at all. Copying is just as fast in Vista as in XP.

msivers

I have also had very slow data tranfer rates when copy/move between my desktop PC (custom built) and my Dell D620 laptop and between my Dell laptop and my work-workstation (XP Pro) via network connections and also when copying or moving data to and from my external hard drive on my desktop PC. It is very frustrating and is often as low as 300Kbps!

I would be interested to know if anyone gets to the bottom of this or finds a solution?!

tribalcactus

Repeat with me:

Hotfix calls are FREE! When you call into the support number, one of the menu options asks if you are calling in about a hotfix.

The whole reason that you are *supposed* to call into support for a hotfix is so that we can track who has gotten the hotfix. If there isa regression or other bug in the hotfix, we can contact the customers who have gotten the hotfix and let them know about it. If it is out in the wild, how are we going to do that?

Ben

DigitalDud

I've never seen this issue after using Vista for a year. Does it only apply to SMB 2.0 or does it happen when accessing an XP machine too?

BlackTiger
If you stumbled and fell down, it doesn't mean yet, that you're going in the wrong direction.

Never using standard Windows Explorer to copy/move large files (or large number of files) since WinXP. It sucks. Really sucks.

I've several times tried in Vista to move(!) several folders (17GB in total size) from one place to another across SAME logical drive and got an error "No free space available". EXACTLY! Drive has only 16GB of free space. That's why I'm moving files instead of copying.

I'm using FAR and happy. Simple and fast. Yes, Explorer in Vista has some nice "new" features, but in FAR it was available for ages in much more simple and logical manner.

Why MS never fixing bugs in UI? I remember ancient bug in XP regading to context menu causing 100% CPU utilization. MS declined to fix it. There was a nice workaround only ("perform left-click on item before right-click. sorry, it's by design."). BTW, Vista has quite strange behaviour in this case too. Looks like this bug still sits somewhere inside Vista's Explorer, but covered by some kind of "default context menu if no items were selected".

littleguru
<3 Seattle

What I have seen is that if you copy a file from a network share or usb drive and if the folder contains a lot of files where a preview is generated (such as for example wmv or avi files) it gets slow. I see it more a combination between copy + creating preview. I can also understand that this gets slow on the local disc, because the preview generating requires quite some CPU.

I have only seen copying getting slow with that!

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

glebd wrote:

2) the problem occurs very often if not every time, and not occasionally, as stated in the article.

It eludes me how a problem like this could have escaped QA or beta testing (word has it, some beta testers filed this problem as a bug several times). Must have been quite a rush to get the thing out of the door.

Occurs Very Often x 0.01% of Users = Infrequent Bug

Don't make the mistake of assuming that a bug you have - even a critical bug that happens all the time - is common in other scenarios. Windows is installed on millions of different hardware/software configurations, and it's impossible to test them all.

glebd
Turning coffee into code

Yggdrasil wrote:

glebd wrote:
2) the problem occurs very often if not every time, and not occasionally, as stated in the article.

It eludes me how a problem like this could have escaped QA or beta testing (word has it, some beta testers filed this problem as a bug several times). Must have been quite a rush to get the thing out of the door.

Occurs Very Often x 0.01% of Users = Infrequent Bug

Don't make the mistake of assuming that a bug you have - even a critical bug that happens all the time - is common in other scenarios. Windows is installed on millions of different hardware/software configurations, and it's impossible to test them all.

I'm sure I'm one of the unfortunate few experiencing this bug. I guess it wasn't prominent enough for MS to pay attention to it (apparently the bug has been spotted by the beta testers.) Well, I'm sure it got their attention now.

intelman

I hope this fix does something. It can't hurt I hope.

Intrestingly enough, I searched google for "slow file copy vista hotfix" and it found this post. I did the same for live search and that didn't work. Live needs to step it up!

EpaL

Folks,

I've been troubleshooting intermittent 'black holes' in transferring a file from Vista to OSX 10.4.9 for the past few days and i'm slowly coming to the conclusion that there is a bug / incompatibility in Vista that is causing 30second delays between packets after an ACK is not recieved.

There is more information on my original post here
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=720119 including a Wireshark cap.

I'd really appreciate it if you guys could take a look - it's driving me up the wall. I've tried everything I can find on the net / think of including the slow file copy hotfix, adjusting the interface tcp global parameters in netsh and different copies of Vista.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

lenninator

I looked at everything I could find on the web about this. And tried them all.

- netsh command to turn features off
- loading hotfix
- Registry settings for:
   - disable ipv6
   - disable other ipv6 features
   - preferences, router settings, etc.
- Buggy routers that don't support syn/fin correctly
- network drivers
- map network drives
- use robocopy

What finally worked for me?

Stupid Cisco corporate switches do NOT support flow control negotiation like every other switch vendor out there.

My cheap gig switch didn't negotiate full/half duplex correctly with Cisco. Works with every other vendor out there except Cisco. Took it out.

Still didn't work.

Vista driver for Dell laptop Broadcom gig card negotiates with my cheap gig switch correctly under Vista, but stupid Cisco corporate switch doesn't negotiate with network card. Had to have IT guy set port to 100Mbit Full duplex. Then had to set my network interface to 100Mbit Full duplex.

Everything works great!

Symptoms were:

Thousands of small files transfer great, until a file larger then about 1MB gets transfered. Then Vista Stalls / Blocks and nothing on the network works to that server. Even other cmd windows block to that server. Opening explore windows to that server block. Until some time out is reached, and then the whole thing blocks again until the timeout is reached again.

EVENTUALLY the larger files get copied, and the whole thing completes.

Really annoying. I would imagine that this absolutely wreaks havoc with all of the fancy Vista auto tuning.

Vista will need some form of a work around, or detection mechanism, because everybody and their dog uses Cisco.  My guess is that network errors go through the roof, and this could easily be detected.

jamie

DigitalDud wrote:
I've never seen this issue after using Vista for a year. Does it only apply to SMB 2.0 or does it happen when accessing an XP machine too?

try moving around your i386 folder on your network Wink

Peter2cfu

I've been having a couple OS issues with VIsta,

1) Vista stopped accessing network shares one day with no warning.
2) Installed a Vista PC at a clients site, when it accessed the network it would take a long time to read network shares,

The solution
1) Moved network patch lead from the 1GB switch to the 100Mb switch, network connectivity was then fully restored. At first 1 did not think anything about this as Vista had been working for a few weeks with the 1GB switches, so took me a little while to make the link.

2) had to change the network card propoertis link speed nagoation from auto to 100MB half duplex, network connectivity was then fully restored.

Pevious to this I had in both times done a complete resionall of the os and installed the patch that can be found at http://hotfix.xable.net/download/index.php?dir=Language%20Neutral/Vista/&file=Windows6.0-KB931770-x86.msu

The patch only allowed me to view the network shares at normal speed and did nothing for file transfer, the copy process would hang at copying any files at any size.

The above fixes worked for me, none of thw others suggested in this tread made any impact.

With both these networks, a varity of OS are in use and had not at anytime showed any connectiviy or copying issues, only Vista.

Hope this helps..

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

Necro-thread alert.

KenQ
Who's richer, the guy with the dough or friends?

This may or may not apply to the KB talked about in this thread but it's the closest i can find.

I have a server at work runing Windows 2003 server. We have a shared network drive on the network that is housing 3,8TB (in just one share).

The files are spread out in different folders on the share, much like everyone would think.

The problem for me is that when using my Vista office computer transfer speeds are horrible. I get speeds as slow as 10Kbytes per sec, whilst using XP, speeds are normal (around 10Mbytes per sec).

I'm not sure what really is the problem but my best guess so far would be to say that maybe this problem occurs more often when the share is extremely large.

I have no issues coping files from other servers in our network, runing on a similar setup but with much smaller shares (50GB~).

cgrossmeier
[ headfull ]

Oh, this sucks! I searched and searched. Applied several hot fixes to resolve the issue and rebooted. Still no luck! For fun, I booted with my old XP Boot Hard Drive and tried again... Copies moved at about 57 to 65MB/Sec. So, I Removed the drive and rebooted with Vista... back to 1MB/sec. Mad

I'm currently using an EVGA 680i Motherboard on a clean Vista Ultiamte x64 install and using two 320GB SATA 300 drives on two seperate controllers. All Windows Updates and distributed hotfixes have been applied. I verified the following hotfixes were installed: KB936824, KB938979, and KB940520. Each addresses slow copy and performance issuses. Still no luck! I even updated to the most recent NVidia drivers to see if NVidia was at fault.

I truely hope SP1 has a solution to this. In the meantime, I'm moving back to XP.

The Vista Team REALLY needs to look at their code and find the performance bottleneck. Also, fix the more than 2GB RAM bug on the x64 Install! A user should be required to remove all the system ram except 1GB to install the OS.

Don't get me wrong, I've supported Microsoft for a long time through good and bad, but this is REALLY a poor release.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop
Seven of Niner! Resistance is Futile!

cgrossmeier wrote:

I'm currently using an EVGA 680i Motherboard on a clean Vista Ultiamte x64 install and using two 320GB SATA 300 drives on two seperate controllers. All Windows Updates and distributed hotfixes have been applied. I verified the following hotfixes were installed: KB936824, KB938979, and KB940520. Each addresses slow copy and performance issuses. Still no luck! I even updated to the most recent NVidia drivers to see if NVidia was at fault.

have you checked if UDMA is enabled on those drives? have you also tried updating your bios and using an HD speed benchmark like HDspeed, HDTach, et. to see if the HDDs read/write speeds are fine?

Red5
Systems Manager Curmudgen

DigitalDud wrote: I've never seen this issue after using Vista for a year. Does it only apply to SMB 2.0 or does it happen when accessing an XP machine too?

I have been on Vista Ultimate since release and I experience this problem all the time on my Toshiba Tecra M4 laptop.

Both on the laptop itself and when I transfer files between my XP box and my laptop.

BHpaddock

cgrossmeier wrote:
Also, fix the more than 2GB RAM bug on the x64 Install! A user should be required to remove all the system ram except 1GB to install the OS.

Err, umm... what?

My system has 4GB of RAM. Same motherboard you have, in fact. Installed Vista x64 just fine.

Either you have bad RAM, or you had Nvidia's SLI bug (which isn't Microsoft's fault).

Is Vista's &quot;slow copy&quot; finally fixed?