Floppies

Last time a friend was complaining about Vista I dismissed him with "I use it over a year and I had no major problems with it".

A bit latter he asked me for stuff I had on disk - "sure, I'll give it to you on usb flash key" - and here pops this well known bug - file transfer from hard disk to usb disks is /slow/ on Vista. I usually don't care for speeds but this time I cursed a bit, and assured him and myself that SP1 is supposed to fix that. Well I hoped that MS would fix this issue with Service Pack 1.

Today I installed SP1 via Windows Update. Tried copying largish file (700 MB) to usb. Hmmm 5 minutes. Jumped to Ubuntu which is installed together with my Vista. Same 5 minutes. Guess a little bit more than 2 MB/s is max speed for my key.

Then we go to a usage scenario that is more common with me - copying VS project folder containing dozens of smaller files. The project is actually very small (it's my hobby project), 860 KB, so I've duplicated it 4 times - now it's 3.22 MB in 188 files and 56 folders.

Let's copy that. Clock stopped at 2:15. That's 135 seconds. Freaking a lot for 3 MB these days.

So let's visit Ubuntu again - copied that same folder with 3 MB of files to the key, unmounted the key (Linux works a bit differently, you have to "unmount" usb key in menus for data to be actually written). It was so quick I couldn't even measure it reliably. So I copied that folder 5 times, now I got 20 project in a folder.
At this point unmounting lasted 25 seconds. As you can see this time Linux doesn't write at full 2 MB/s too, but it is far far far (and I stress the word far) ahead from windows. 5 (25/5 = 5) seconds against 135 seconds. 27 fold speed difference.

I've updated second PC, the one that has Vista installed for less than two weeks and has no junk like you might suspect previous system had. 2:25.
You can argue measurement was not performed reliably - remove 50% of measured time in favour to Windows and Linux still beats it heavily.

I also don't do that to bash windows (go and see my previous posts, I actually hate Linux with passion), but this thing really bothers me.

I will be happy if anybody can convince me I made mistake and this complete post is a pile of nonsense and if that happens I'll remove it, else the post's staying.
It's high time for some execs to actually respond to this, some people inside MS have been sitting on their asses more than a year not doing anything to fix the problem. XP performed much better, this kind of stuff gives bad name to Windows and Microsoft.



Why's the title "floppies"?