Vista Slow Copy issue:

[AJ Dual]

I just thought of this with the other thread on Toshiba laptops, how most have had good/decent experiences, most problems being Vista-related itself.

And that reminded me.  Mrs. Dual's Vista Toshiba laptop when copying around media and files on our home peer-to-peer network over Wi-Fi is getting about 100-150kbps which is problematic as she was trying to import archives of family photos and 8mm DV camcorder MPEGS from one of our other PC's.

I've done a fair amount of researching on it, and I've tried everything:

I've turned off the indexing service
I've turned off TCP/IP tuning. (they should call it "de tuning" IMO)
I've turned off the windows firewall on both machines. Running inside a hardware firewall. Mrs. Dual knows how to activate it when on the road.
I've disabled AVG on both machines. (temporarily for the copy)
I've made sure the removeable storage managment service was active.
The Microsoft "hotfix" for the issue is worthless, because it pre-dates SP1 for Vista. And many tech bloggers and forum posters have said it does not help.

Granted, I don't expect it to be lightning fast over Wi-Fi, but I'm sitting 10 feet away from a 802.11G router and signal strength is 100%, and running at the full 54Mbit/s I expect more than that. Even just a couple of Mb/sec would be fine. And I've eliminated the Wi-Fi with a direct 100mbit full-duplex hub connection as well It got me up to maybe 200kbps/sec on file copy transfers.  And I really can't try firmware upgrades to the Wi-Fi because it's AT&T U-Verse's router. I can manage connections, but not update firmware, much less try something radical like third-party software like the Cisco/Linksys products allow.


Apparently it's a pretty well known issue:

http://techxpress.wordpress.com/2007/04/29/vista-slow-file-copydeletemove-vista-the-woe-starts-now/

http://mytechweblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/slow-file-copymove-in-vista-here-is_05.html

http://www.vistax64.com/network-internet/108779-very-slow-network-file-copy.html

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/253536-Is-Vistas-quotslow-copyquot-finally-fixed/

Has anyone here beaten this issue? 

[AZRedhawk44]

Nope... just piling on the stories of woe and despair to add that I was forced to use a Vista laptop at my last job in order to be more familiar with it... and could never get it to copy a file quickly.  I remember noticing it was bone-crushing-slow when copying even hardwired on a LAN.

[CNYCacher]

Transferring files between two computers connected to the same wifi router can take forever.  Hard-wire one (or both) of the computers to the router temporarily and watch the speed fly.

[AJ Dual]

Transferring files between two computers connected to the same wifi router can take forever.  Hard-wire one (or both) of the computers to the router temporarily and watch the speed fly.

Yes indeed. The speed doubled when I hardwired it.

I think I actually saw 300kbps at one point. 

Before AT&T U-Verse, I was getting by on my 11mbit Linksys 802.11b router, and I was seeing file transfer rates of at least 800kbps-1MB/sec when going from Xp to Xp...

And I hear grumblings that the Windows 7 release candidates are no better, and rumors that there's some quasi-intelligent DRM pattern matcher looking for licensed media which is intercepting all the copy operations first.

[CNYCacher]

Yes indeed. The speed doubled when I hardwired it.
I think I actually saw 300kbps at one point. 

Ugh.  That's bad.  I've seen speeds as low as what you are getting go up 4-fold when you hard-wire one.

[mellestad]

The technical explanation is that wireless connections are not full duplex like a cat5 connection is.

Over wireless you cannot send and receive at the same time, so things can take far longer.

But it still sounds like something is screwed up.  Do you have SP2 installed?

[AZRedhawk44]

AJ's supposition over DRM is similar to my own suppositions.

I was actually guessing that it had to do with an attempt by MS to terminate peer to peer non-domain-centric file sharing in small offices in order to obtain more server OS sales.  That, and to sniff the packet and see if it originated from a Samba server rather than a windows machine.

Regardless, even on full duplex 100mb hardwired LAN, I was never able to get more than about 300k transfer rates inside the same subnet when copying via Vista.  Nice and potent computers, too.  Same computers running XP would copy at 5+ megabit.

[mellestad]

AJ's supposition over DRM is similar to my own suppositions.

I was actually guessing that it had to do with an attempt by MS to terminate peer to peer non-domain-centric file sharing in small offices in order to obtain more server OS sales.  That, and to sniff the packet and see if it originated from a Samba server rather than a windows machine.

Regardless, even on full duplex 100mb hardwired LAN, I was never able to get more than about 300k transfer rates inside the same subnet when copying via Vista.  Nice and potent computers, too.  Same computers running XP would copy at 5+ megabit.

Just my 2c, I run over 100 Vista PC's, and I get transfers just as fast as XP and 2000 when the systems are properly service packed.

There *was* a bug in the initial Vista release, but it was resolved.  If you have such a specific issue it might be a storage device driver problem.  Vista killed a lot of compatibility when it came out.

[AJ Dual]

But it still sounds like something is screwed up.  Do you have SP2 installed?

Yes, SP2 is installed.

And just for excrement and giggles, I installed the MS hotfix for the issue even though SP1 was supposed to make it obsolete.

Just my 2c, I run over 100 Vista PC's, and I get transfers just as fast as XP and 2000 when the systems are properly service packed.

There *was* a bug in the initial Vista release, but it was resolved.  If you have such a specific issue it might be a storage device driver problem.  Vista killed a lot of compatibility when it came out.

True, OTOH, this Toshiba Satellite laptop, the only Vista PC in the house shipped with Vista. It wasn't an upgrade.