I tried Vista on release day and i thought it was crap... explorer.exe was like a **cannot find language appropriate for these forums**.. every time you asked it to do anything there was that green flowing bar of death.. and when vista tried to automatically shuffle folders when you renamed them had some sort of mutant lag on it where a different file gets renamed and all sorts of weird stuff... and i was afraid to open some of my larger folders cas of how sad it ran... how can opening folders rattle a 3ghz core2duo - 4GB - WD RE2 hdd...

but erm bout 2 weeks ago I isntalled Vista Ultimate x64 SP1... and like wow! I've only encountered two bugs... one with nero and when I create an ISO from files on my hdd.. the speed starts of 70,000KB/s but after not long grinds down to under 1,000KB/s... but i guess thats nero anyways (as changing software fixes it)... the other bug I've come across is using Remote Desktop Connection to view an XP Pro machine i get garbage on the screen... see screenshot here (note: the software involved in this screenshot is not the only text affected, explorer windows are among others) this never happened using XP x64 Pro to view this same XP 32 Pro machine... sometimes words will be replaced with other words found somewhere else in the desktop (same words but new font appropriate to where they appear).. really weird.. but this does not affect any data totally a cosmetic error..

Other than that and playing Crysis on DX10/Very High/1680x1050 @ 18-28fps which is verry upsetting indeed.... I lurrrv Windows Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 now...

noticed you have VNC on your other computer do you get the same result when loggin on with vnc instead of RDC?

whoa... shows how often i change the OS on good ol' Raptor.. I haven't had VNC installed on my main machine in over 6 months... I'll load it up and have a look, but they both handle the display very differently so i doubt they'll have similar results..

the results are intermittent so i could be waiting forever


ahh see it's done it again.. this time with words...

if you notice the timecodes on the program directly relate to an explorer window open on the Vista desktop.....

great VNC is letting me access the logon screen for Raptor but after I enter the password the program exits without notification...

I work with IE8 b.1 on Vista Enterprise SP1 RTM without problems.

Yes. You should uninstall SP1 RC v.688

My husband and I are new system builders. Our first experience was with Windows Home Server, which was in a very basic hardware configuration. Anyway, our specs are an ASUS motherboard PK5-E/WiFi-AP, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghtz, 2 gigbyte (adding more soon) 300 gigabyte SATA hard disk, ATI HD 2600 Pro video card, Creative SB X-Fi HD sound card, Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabyte Ethernet Controller, Realtek RTL8187 802.11b/g USB 2.0 Wireless Network Adapter, flopy disk drive, Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111C ATA disk drive, Agere OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394FireWire and other goodies just for starters, with a Antec 500 Watt PS, and an Antec case which rocks. In our humble and inexperienced opinions anyway. lol

We installed Vista Ultimate about a month ago, and then installed SP1 two weeks later. I must say that the system does seem snappier with SPI than without. I fully understand most of the fixes in SP1 are under the hood, and have read up on what they are and what they fix.

Our installation went smooth and completed in under fifteen minutes. I think this is mostly due to the fact our Vista installation was so new. Not a lot had been added to the system, so there wasn't a lot to work around.

Everything runs fine, not a single hitch. I have spent a great deal of time getting to know Vista Ultimate. I think Vista is a huge improvement over XP Pro. This system almost takes care of itself. I like the Problem Reports and Solutions, the revamped Event Viewer and Proformance utilities, and even the UAC is worthy of getting use to working with. My only complaint is I believe Vista should enable SATA without having to go through the hassle of "adding additional drivers". Due to our newness, we did not know we needed to add those drivers and so our SATA hard disk is actually running as IDE, and can only be changed by a full reinstallation.

Thanks for starting this thread, this is my very first post in this group. This topic is a good way for me to get my feet wet here. I found the group through pure chance, and hope to receive some help on the SATA driver installation.

SerenityRee

i find it still has the file transfer speed problems and explorer reliablity problems. to copy files from my usb 2 hard drive to my sata2 hard i get speeds of 7-10kb/s YES kb/s..... then it becomes unresponsive after about 5 mins

SP1 to me has made no difference in performance.... im begining to think vista x64 is a lame duck.... am going back to xp sp3 for now until either vista x64 is fixed (sp2 or 3) or windows 7 or whatever vista's replacement is gonna be called comes out...........which ever happens first.

i wish Autodesk would make AutoCAD for Ubuntu x64......... i would make the switch in a heartbeat...

just copied a 9mb file and it is about 14 mins in its still not copied this is complete rubbish ---- 17kb/s what a load of crap this vista x64 sp1 is

update

file still not finished transferring......now says needs 50 mins

update again

had enough its now unrepsonsive

im bining vista and going back to XP SP3

this ops sys is rubbish

Yes. The OS must be rubbish! It couldn't be a driver issue (USB or mass storage) or anything like that

While I haven't used Vista pre-SP1 (that might have had issues), I'm just not seeing the transfer speed problems you're having. My transfer speeds between SATA drives (pushing over 100MB/sec sustained), SATA drives and USB2 external stuff (less speed, mostly limited by the garbage USB chipsets in enclosures or flash write speeds), and over the network aren't much different than XP's overall.

I've never seen anyone with such slow transfers on any box, using any version of windows before, or any other OS for that matter (unless you want to include laplink transfer speeds on a 486 in the contest?) That should tell you something -- it's not a Vista problem, something is definitely wrong with your box (either the hardware, bad drivers, or something along those lines).

the usb drive works perfectly in xp sp3.......the sata2 drive works perfectly in xp sp3........ neither drives work properly with vista x64 sp1... copy files from one location on the c: drive to another location on d: (second partition on same physical drive) takes hours when it does work but most of the time it fails with a not responding error after about 10 mins... why couldnt they just reuse the code xp uses for file transferring...... its tried tested and WORKS correctly why reinvent the wheel when the current one works fine?

My system Specs are as follows

Amd athlon x2 6000+ @ 3.0ghz
Asus M2N E SLI mainboard
XFX nVidia Geforce 8500GT 512MB PCI-E 16x graphics
Hauppauge HVR 1300MCE tv tuner
16x Toshiba DVD Dual layer R/RW/RAM drive
4gb (4x 1024mb) Corsair XMS2 PC6400 DDR RAM
500GB SATA2 Western Digital Hard Drive
Soundblaster Xi FI audio extreme PCI -E x1 soundcard
Buffalo 54g Wifi pci
USB2 Western Digital Book 500gb External Harddrive (Black one)

Surely with a rig like that i should be getting better performance than an old 386 pc in vista....
with XP Pro sp3 (with only 3gb RAM) & Ubuntu x64 on the otherhand is very quick on this rig.

One more reason to think you have a driver problem under Vista (problems with nvidia's drivers would hardly be surprising)


They've actually improved it quite a bit. Details here.


File copy also works correctly under Vista. They're hardly reinventing the wheel here...

Just a very quick screenshot of transferring a 770MB test file between 2 drives (between SATA drives, from a temp folder folder on C, and the disk I use for VMware images)

That's not even close to the fastest I've seen, but I'd say this is still a perfectly acceptable speed.

That and the out of memory while copying files bug (which is still present in SP1) are the 2 main reasons I switched back to XP64. Most everything else looked unfinished and like it was slapped together.



Not everyone experiences the "WOW" with Vista. I have very high end machine and Vista was very sluggish. It was a default OS install with the drivers that come on the Vista DVD.

Well, there you go. Try with SP1 and up to date drivers, it'll make quite a difference.

Much like the people who were complaining about their games running slower, that's been solved too for the most part.

The thing is, an OS can only be as good as the drivers for your hardware are. Your drivers suck? Windows is gonna suck too -- no matter what version. That's what it all comes down to.

There's no reason for it to be sluggish on a "very high end machine", when it works just as fast as XP on a decent dual core box (that isn't memory starved). Besides, right after installing, things are always a bit more sluggish -- defrag hasn't done its job yet (it'll run when your PC is idle), the index has to be built from scratch, superfetch isn't tuned yet, and just like XP there's some optional stuff you might want to disable (e.g. system restore), etc.

I see that Mark Russinovich's article quoted very often. Have you read it entirely?



OK, this might be the fault of Server 2003 or the slow network. (But it didn't stop Microsoft taking good money for 5 years for Server2003. Shouldn't they at least issue a hotfix?)



And this would be... what... the most frequent case of copy operation a normal user would issue?





My understanding of Mark's article is they have (re)invented square wheels with Vista, and with SP1 they've made them oval - drastical improvement.
The "scenario" that is "drastically improved" is "copying files on high-latency, high-bandwidth networks" (how many of these you've got?) and is begging for help from many other subsystems. (So the improvement is in them, not in file copy).

I must mention that I have nothing but utter respect for Mark and his knowledge and integrity, but I doubt even he could go openly against his current employer... So one must read everything carefully.

And to return to the topic again, please remind me why was all this necessary?

GL

No, I just like to paste URLs to articles I haven't read


From what he says, it's the combination of Win 2003 + slow network, and the issue is with Win2003 itself. They made Vista SP1 use a somewhat slower transfer (smaller blocks) to prevent a problem with Windows 2003's cache manager, instead of fixing Win 2003. I'd hardly blame Vista or this... Besides, just how much difference does it make in real life? 10% slower perhaps? And how often is your network that bloody slow that it affects your servers? And again, would you really rather have a somewhat faster transfer, and then your Win 2003 server crashing because of it?


Again, it's not that simple. A lot of design decisions are tradeoffs. Smaller I/O buffers, for a more responsive system, or bigger chunks for a slightly faster transfer, but a not as responsive system? The problem only applies when you copy to/from the same disk, which is actually not all that common. Most of the time when you do something on the same disk, you move files, not make copies of it, and if it's 2 different drives, then it doesn't increase seeking anyways. It's not like it will make a HUGE difference either (one could make a small app to benchmark a file copy like that with different buffer sizes in no time at all). And again, like he says, this is more of an issue with older disks that don't have NCQ and such. Disk fragmentation itself could easily have a lot more effect than this (increasing seeking lots more). It's really not that bad, and if it makes the system more responsive, then why not?

Another screenshot, about this specific "issue", that speaks for itself (and I really ought to defrag sometime):

I think this is still very acceptable. We're still a VERY long shot from his 10KB/sec file copy issues (by a factor of about 10 thousand)


That was a problem with the RTM, which needed some tweaks, and as he says:

As in, it's always faster at all file operations than XP and below, with a couple minor exceptions where it's slower than Vista RTM (where performance isn't bad anyways, just reduced a tiny bit). Notice he doesn't say anywhere that XP is actually faster at anything anywhere. I don't think that really sounds bad.


How's that reinventing the wheel? Using caching (nothing new), tuning buffer size (like any app that does file I/O does), auto RWIN resize (a VERY good thing for your network at high speeds, we used to have to do that by hand), and the next version of the plain old SMB protocol. What's so drastically changed? I'm just not seeing it. It works just fine.

Instead of turning this into a flamewar, I suggest you read the comments on the article. Although there is some of the usual Vista bashing, there are MANY valid points (that can also be presented as a reply to your reply. ) I guess that's because Mark blog is read by many technical people.

I'm not one of those people that need always to have the last word. If you want, we can continue the discussion through PM, (and I have a reply to every point you raise ), but, as I have said in another thread before, I see no point - both our minds are set towards opposite things and I doubt either would change his mind.

I see this thread as a healthy discussion, not as flaming, but I see no fruitful outcome. So... peace man!

Hmmm... on the other hand, wouldn't opening a sandbox on the forum with free flaming (Windows vs all others, XP vs Vista...) free the threads from repeating same things over and over again?

GL

Neither do I, but I sure do love to argument, and you could say I'm strongly opinionated on certain things


You're certainly right on this one. We could throw it back and forth for just about forever without flaming, but I can't see myself change my mind over this, and seemingly not you either. So I think we can leave it at "agree to disagree" too.

So far my SP1 experience has been very good. We don't actively use it yet, but we have finally gotten through our evaluation period and will adopt it very shortly. I have only had to use it twice, and in both instances, we used it to fix two issues we were having with hardware or software configs that weren't working properly with RTM. In both cases, the root cause of problem was sysprep, however.

After installing vista sp1 i noticed one main difference.

When i go into system properties (winkey +pause ) it says

windows ultimate edition
sp1


lol

thats all i got so far