PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1 210
Mac writes "PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:2, Insightful)
9% cpopy speed-up noticable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, unless the huge copy time problem has been fixed people will not be happy. Going from 15 minutes to 13.5 minutes is not going to make MS any friends.
Ahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
It should also be noted however he was testing the file transfer with a SD card, I would assume they behave similar to your standard USB flash drive and is generally either optimized for speedily transferring large files, or small files but rarely both...
One would think copying a Blue-Ray disc image across 2 hard drives would be more appropriate? Or at least using a standardized mix set of data, both files large and small. Word documents, mp3 files, disc images... But wait this is PC World... Not exactly at the forefront of reliable and unbiased testing...
Re:9% cpopy speed-up noticable? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, the slow copying speed when copying LARGE amounts of data sucks, but the WORST part of Vista is the slow copying speed when copying/moving small files. I mean, moving a file to the Recycle Bin takes 2 seconds! Copying a shortcut from one folder to another on the same drive takes 2 seconds! Those things should happen instantly, and DID happen instantly on XP, and every version of Windows before that.
That's where the performance problems really piss people off. A %9 improvement doesn't do squat.
Exhaustive testing (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair to PC World they do say that this is informal and preliminary and they will publish comprehensive results in due course. My criticism is that this makes front page of Slashdot (the reason of course is that it's somewhat critical of Vista and therefore of course is great news here in anti-MS FUD world).
It astonished me that stories about Mark Russinovich's blog post on Vista file copying (including changes implemented for SP1 after customer feedback) were rejected.
It strikes me as feeble that the Slashdot crowd all scream FUD! whenever MS are guilty of it (frequently), but then commit the same sin themselves in the other direction.
And the other thing that hacks me off is that this post will no doubt be modded flamebait or troll which means worse karma (got none anyhow) and therefore no voice. It's an interesting effect of the Slashdot moderation scheme that any criticism of Slashdot is suppressed. Free speech doesn't flourish here (unless you follow the herd!)
Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements (Score:5, Insightful)
In Vista they changed this so the dialog actually closed when the copy was complete, but now in SP1 they have gone back to the previous setup.
Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a very interesting read.
It is, but let me summarize it for a sad realization:
"In XP, we just issued 64kb read/writes via the standard API-s and used Cache Manager.
In Vista, a team saw a problem than no one before saw, and wrote a dedicated, big, complex engine, the File Copy Engine (tm) that, among other things, doesn't use caching in most instances, because it might take extra 128kb of RAM or so, and This Was Bad.
Improvements in SP1: we went back to XP's engine, with some tweaks."
Do you remember that previous case of a Microsoft programmer spending an year on a minor tweak of Vista's Start Menu? It was not the exception, guys. Sad.
Well, I think they're slowly getting their act together under Sinofsky's leadership, though.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
They say "suck it till we find a fix"... (Score:2, Insightful)
Question -
Response -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624 [microsoft.com]
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
No thanks, I'll just skip the paying $400 for Vista Ultimate part.
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Insightful)
On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin--tirelessly proved out in benchmark after benchmark--that never actually went away until...ever. Microsoft just stopped supporting the older OS without special contracts, and people just sort of stopped using Windows 2000 in general. And so XP became the new performance baseline.
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated. But that is where my praise ends: it might be small, but it was still difficult to use in a lot of places. Windows XP did actually improve the usability quite a bit, although style wise it was a mixed blessing. And since SP2 there is no comparison: XP is just a lot more secure.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
FILE Copying? Am I in the 80's? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best sales pitch for SP1 is that it COPIES FILES FASTER? Which is still probably slower than it was with XP, thus making it a non-improvement?
Ridiculous.
Re:Exhaustive testing (Score:4, Insightful)
We're sorry. We screwed up. Reverted to the previous code. Better now. Steve, where is my brown paper bag?
Now what is the FUD here exactly. I really doubt file copying should deserve such a lengthy article.
ps. I'd rather they implemented some sane error handling in Explorers copy function, so it doesn't crap out at the first read only file. This is the reason I use the Windows port of Midnight Commander to copy/move directories on Windows. Did they fix THAT in Vista?
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:3, Insightful)
No stopwatch required (Score:3, Insightful)
That's fifteen hours in a week! In numerical computing it would very nice to get such huge speedups on long running jobs - 9% improvement is a huge amount. In desktop computing that process of copying say a 42GB file would also be noticably less painfull with a 9% speedup.
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:4, Insightful)
By now we should have correct, complete and RESUMABLE file and directory copies regardless of the source and target directories. It can be done. Just check out Robocopy. In fact Robocopy and RobocopyGUI are still the only good ways supported by Microsoft of copying large directories or whole drives within Windows in an environment where a crash is possible. (Don't even get me started on Synctoy crashes).
Why can't an end user just let the OS know they want these directories copied to here? Why do you still have to set up one copy at a time from a GUI? I can batch a copy, but I can't add to it when it's already started, and if I want proper control and logging I have to do it from the command line with a list of switches.
Who cares if they can get security working etc. if they can't even get the basic functionality right!?