Vista's long goodbye

[4Dude]

Deleting files can take forever

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Monday 26th March 2007 23:57 GMT
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Windows Vista suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files, a flaw that has provoked consternation in online forums.
......According to a thread on Microsoft's TechNet site, Microsoft has issued a hotfix for the problem, but it has failed to quell the outrage. For one thing, individual users must get Microsoft's approval before the fix can be downloaded, according to our tipster. And for another, hotfixes are more of a pain to install than patches. [more]Unreal!!


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/vista_copying_bug

[jeffy]

Are they kidding? :eek:
"To add to the problem, you can't cancel or anything."

Has anyone seen it yet?

[foxyshadis]

Does this report seem surreal to anyone else who uses XP? No one has ever tried to delete a locked file on XP and had to drum their fingers for a few minutes while explorer keeps retrying, with no ability to cancel? So is it really the entire system that's affected? That's a bit worse, certainly, but not a whole lot more annoying.

btw, 4dude, Microsoft's policy on hotfixes has always been the same. It's cute that the reporter doesn't seem to know that, but just look at any hotfix page: contact to recieve download. They do this to prevent people from installing willy-nilly what are usually minimally tested patches, sometimes made by support techs. They aren't formally reviewed, rewritten, and tested until they're integrated into a rollup, service pack, or security fix. Whether you agree with their stance or not, they do it to keep from having to support thousands of possible dll versions.

[jeffy]

I've had a quick look at the thread mentioned (6 pages):
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1358057&SiteID=17

It seems really interesting:
"Chiming in to say I'm finding the same problems. Any deletion, creation, move, copy of files takes FOREVER. These basic features were faster in 3.1, let alone XP or 98 "

"I am having exactly the same problem. Even rename of very small files on the same partition takes a very long time and blocks the explorer of this window. Hope to get a solution or workaround soon. "

[foxyshadis]

Sounds a lot like the A43 file manager in bartpe then. Never figured out why it acts like that, but it's a huge irritation.

[JohnnyMalaria]

In that TechNet thread, there is a workaround - turn off thumbnail generation....

(Not ideal, but it does supposedly "fix" the issue)

[jeffy]

Thank you, John, for pointing this out! That thread is really worth reading.

BTW, what do you personally think?
"I have 2GB RAM, and have been experiencing this same issue. Deleting a text file from the desktop has taken more than a minute at times. It just sits at 0% and thinks about what it's going to do."

p. 6:
"Dual core athlons with 2gig of ram and other machines of high spec, previously worked FINE with XP (so no blaming of the network)

So far I've tried the following fixes which seem to keep cropping up

* RDC - Remote differential compression - Turned OFF - No difference
* netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled - No difference
* Control panel -> Folder options -> show icons, never thumbnails - No difference"

[Gornot]

I haven't even tried using Vista because of all the rumors and stories like this one... Another major pain in my butt is.. Well... Is it really true what people say about using third-party software on Vista. A friend of mine tells me that he can't install an antivirus, but has to work with Vista's. The same thing goes for burning CD/DVD's. Vista does not allow installation of Nero + requires Microsoft's licenses for every damn audio file that you try to burn...

I know a few people who got Vista because they got bored of XP and all it's nightmares. Now the same people use Linux :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

Dude, it's not Microsoft's fault if software doesn't support their Operating System. It all will eventually, no doubt about it.

The same thing happened when XP came out. The same CD Burning software that had worked fine on 98/ME didn't work on XP (and caused all sorts of horrific problems IIRC).

The same goes for AntiVirus software. Of course old non vista compatible AV apps won't work on Vista, because it's a fundamentally different OS. Sure it's still based on NT, but that doesn't mean it does everything the same.

I tried vista for awhile, but wasn't really happy with how much RAM it used just sitting on the desktop (600MB of my 1GB physical RAM, compared to ~300MB for XP). That, and it just didn't feel as efficient as XP to me. Of course, that always happens with new OSes (except maybe with 2k :D).

I'm totally sure I will be using it in a year or two... and most of you will too :D

~MiSfit

[prOnorama]

Only when I really need Vi$ta I will think about upgrading from XP

But since (Ubuntu) Linux seems to be getting more user friendly and hardware friendly I hope to be able to switch to that (I don't really play games so no treshold there)

[foxyshadis]

AVG, Avast, NOD32, Kaspersky have supported Vista for some time, and Avira's is coming in April; those are the only antiviruses worth caring about. If your friend was having trouble with Symantec/Norton or McAfee, good riddance to overpriced junk software.

Vista's a good OS, in my opinion, after a few weeks of using it on someone else's system. It's not different enough from XP, I think, to be worth all the grousing or the upgrade price. (Aside from software & driver compatibility, and people who love seeing huge amounts of memory wasted in the task manager.) I won't have a problem upgrading as soon as I get a low/no cost copy.

I wonder if anyone has a mac that also runs vista and debian yet. =p

[JohnnyMalaria]

Thank you, John, for pointing this out! That thread is really worth reading.

BTW, what do you personally think?


Personally? Well, I've been using Vista Ultimate RTM since November and haven't experienced any show-stopping problems. Yes, the "Calculating time to copy...." is irritating. The constant UAC prompts sometimes have me muttering various choice Anglo-Saxon phrases. But - I leave UAC turned on simply because I use the system for compiling and testing software - so I want to ensure that the OS is configured "out of the box". I've had some headaches with porting software to account for the changes in the OS. But - it is a *major* OS release (i.e., it's NT 6.0, whereas XP is NT 5.1 - merely a minor OS release of 2K - NT5.0). I could have ignored the differences - but I wanted to make sure the software runs on Vista as well as XP (both 32-bit and 64-bit). (Actually, I haven't revamped some of the Winsock stuff yet - but nobody has complained about the related feature of our software not being available under Vista).

I think the amount of bitching-and-moaning about Vista is disproportionately large compared to the impact of the issues. I certainly haven't had a BSOD with Vista (is it even blue?!!!) and the only hardware incompatibility is with an old soundcard (that even XP has problems with). However, I haven't upgraded an existing OS installation to Vista - both my 32-bit and 64-bit Vista partitions are clean installations.

All my external hard drives, camcorders, DV decks work just fine and I do prefer the look and feel of Vista (with Aero) to XP. But - right now - I have to say my prefered incarnation of Windows is XP Pro x64....

[Gornot]

AVG, Avast, NOD32, Kaspersky have supported Vista for some time
He had a problem with Avast :mad:

I asked a friend of mine who was studying OPs and is an expert in every single one of them. He says that, although Vista is a huge jump from XP, it isn't worth buying at least until SP1 comes out... Maybe then I'll think of switching to the new OP, but until then I'm still using that Vista pack for transforming the look of XP to the one of Vista and am pretty satisfied with it...

[DewAsmara]

Well for me,
Vista is good operating system, well they have some weak point offcourse like others new operating system. Yes there is some flaw in start menu, that I cannot move some shortcut and folder shortcut not sure why, and also have bugs in their Media Player that some graphics card cannot play DVD due to crash between decoder in WMP and VGA card. But no problem as I can play with old VLAN 8.5 (Not sure why VLAN 8.6a crash with Vista and failed to function in any video format). As I am not in the mood to play DivX or any code right now, for DivX I have DivX player and for HDDVD and BD I will play from PDVD7.3 so yes problem solve :p

[check]

I've been using vista business on my laptop for a few weeks now, and I really wish I had a spare xp professional product key lying around :(. My biggest gripes with it are that it doesn't actually add anything I want, but adds or changes a lot of things I don't.
For the new features I don't use:
o better searching. for me, indexing is not worth even the small overhead it incurs. I search so rarely that it's just a bother to have it. The new search textboxes everywhere are similarly annoying.
o speed! It's noticeably less responsive than the xp home I was booting into for a few days, even with the win2k skin and all effects beyond the basic few required off.
o stability. A few programs regularly crash for me, a few others dont even install.
o the start menu gives less room to everything, but I'm not a fan of the way the programs menu doesn't pop out, and is instead constrained into a small space. I don't want to play with fiddly scroll bars when opening a program!
o final irritant, the arrows next to each column title in details view. grouping == evil and it makes everything a little harder to read.
As for things that are changed:
o networking centre. not a fan, and even less of a fan for all the new networking stuff they have added, like cardspace and such.
o control panel has been dumbed down, everything is a few more clicks away

[DewAsmara]

o networking centre. not a fan, and even less of a fan for all the new networking stuff they have added, like cardspace and such.

Yeah,
I have problem also with network, it doesn't have protocol for novell netware. The NFS system works fine but only recognize computer in my office LAN, but cannot find hardisk drive in server that operate under Novell System. With another system even Windows Home very easy to connect and find into hardisk in network server, but this one (Vista) pretty bad.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Yeah,
I have problem also with network, it doesn't have protocol for novell netware.

According to Novell, a client will be available for Vista in "mid-2007":

http://www.novell.com/products/clients/#vista

You can get a beta version (see http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=768620&SiteID=17)

Given Novell CEO's "we will attack Vista" stance, IMHO this a deliberate delay.