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That bug's probably a timing bug -- part of an annoying series of bugs where Windows gets a task done in a resonable amount of time but throughout the process tells you it'll be done in 2 years or some silly thing.

No, it really does take that long to uncompress a 10 MB file. It's not just where it's telling the end user the wrong amount of time before it completes. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the indexing, but make no mistake - Vista has set a record for being incredibly slow when it comes to just uncompressing a file.

I saw that during the Vista beta, fortunately no longer. It would go at 100bytes per second for some reason.

I just use 7-zip anyway, it's far superior.

7-zip actually makes far smaller archives too. I don't know if Vista has improved on this, but often I get 20-30% more compression in 7-zip, especially when archiving large amounts of data.

Edited 2007-11-16 11:53

funny, when I use tar and gzip, it never takes that lon... oh, wait. nevermind.

It's not just ZIP - all IO activities done from the shell (copying, moving, deleting, opening network shares, etc.) have the same issue.

It's *supposed* to be fixed, but I hear it's still there, just a little bit harder to spot.

I just zipped about 25 MB in about 5-6 seconds on Vista (right click on folder -> Send to -> Compressed (zipped) Folder. (AMD X2 2.2 GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB SATA HDD).

Problems with copying, etc. files/folders have been fixed, as far as I can tell. Keep your system up-to-date with Windows or Microsoft Update.

Edited 2007-11-15 22:47

What about decompression?

Restart your PC first to clear the cache... Mod it down all you like, but I've seen first hand that Vista deals with files created in the same session far faster than those in previous sessions.

Man.. I didn't mod you down, why should I. I know well that Vista did have those problems. But as I said, as of a few months ago, I can't say that I still encounter them.

Restart your PC first to clear the cache...

Restart my PC? Why would I want to do that? I mean, it's not like I am doing that normally.

I will though, just to see what happens and I'll post the result here.

OK, here it is after the restart (even though, this is the stupidest idea ever, no offense).

Vista unzipped the file in about 20 seconds (7-zip did it in about 4-5 seconds).

Yeah, I know Vista is not champion when it comes to either compressing or uncompressing, but it is nowhere near what you said.

Why is it so hard to believe that Microsoft does indeed fix problems through Windows Update?

I can't say that they fixed all those problems, I just don't see them any more.

Edited 2007-11-15 23:07

disabling aero and and enabling each explorer window to run in separate process helped me to solve whole bunch of such problems

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/07/1715181...

Here is the reason, on Microsoft's own site.

Great link. Thanks for the info.

Still reeks of incompetence. Why not continue using the same algorithm as XP? Anyway, the blog indicates that it'll be fixed in SP1. We'll see...

Edit:
Not that XP is great at creating zips. I've found that on my XP machine, if I select say, 100 jpegs and do a SendTo-CompressedFolder command, the first 50 or so files are processed nearly instantaneously, but after that it gets slower and slower and slower until the last few files take like 10 seconds each. I'm guessing that for each jpeg, the zipfile is opened and closed, so each operation would get slower as more files were added and the zip file gets bigger (though even that wouldn't explain the massive slowdown, I don't think).

BUT if I instead select a *folder* that contains those same 100 jpegs, and do SendTo-Compressedfolder on that folder, then the entire process completes in like 3 seconds (of course the created zip file is different, since the jpegs are within a "directory" within the zip file). In that case, I'm guessing that the operation keeps the zip file open while adding each file to it. Why they don't use the same algorithm for the first case, I don't have a clue. More incompetence, I guess.

In both cases, opening the zipfile is nearly instantaneous on XP, unlike Vista (so I read and am told).

Edited 2007-11-16 19:22

hehe
Reading the comment's to Mark Russinovich's blog, someone speculated that the reason that XP's built-in compression is so inefficient was to not put the likes of WinZip, WinRAR, PowerArchiver, etc out of business. And maybe Microsoft went overboard in doing that for Vista. :p It actually sounds reasonable. Though I would suspect that it's maybe only implicit; meaning that they didn't intentionally make Window's compression suck, but certainly didn't bother to make it fast (or even reasonable, in Vista's case) either, for the sake of those 3rd-party guys.

Edited 2007-11-16 20:19

That happens so MS can claim the 'zip' standard is broken and introduce their new one.

"That happens so MS can claim the 'zip' standard is broken and introduce their new one."

...which will require Windows Vista, and on top of that, a very recent machine to run.

It's eWeek, what did you expect? When their fluff magazine wasn't doing too great, they had to improvise and use interstitial ads and other junk.

They probably can't afford to pay their journalists to do proper research either.

If you are up to date with windows update, you have the majority of it already. But if you want more of an overview

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_sp1.asp

"Whats the update on Windows XP SP3?
Last I heard there were rumors but nothing concrete. This is the release i'm waiting for. Long as the lifeline isn't a year or something I'm going to buy it. Vista scares me still."

Here's an October 2007 article on the beta of XP SP3.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2200761,00.asp

Last build number I've had my mits on is 3205, which I believe was the official Windows XP SP3 "beta 1".

Edited 2007-11-16 00:58

This is the latest I've seen:
http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/windows-xp-sp3-beta-build-3205-releas...

funny, vista boots in ~50 seconds on my 6 month old laptop. Either the writer makes perogies at the speed of sound, or his laptop wasnt up to the requirements.

From what I've read, the zip functionality in Vista's explorer is slow, and unacceptibly so, even today (but still faster than it was months ago). But is your test a fair one? On Linux, you're calling zip from a command line and measuring the speed of that. My understanding is that calling a zip utility from the command line in Vista is fast too.

Edited 2007-11-16 16:00

Once again, I was *compiling* something while I ran the test. Everybody seems to have posted results from their dual core systems at a fairly relaxed state (firefox, maybe a movie playing?), I was compiling code and compressing even faster. Maybe all the extra windows stuff is worth it, just not for me.

Using winrar to zip the very same file took me 26 seconds. Noone is trying to prove that the windows builtin zip utility is any good, just trying to stop the FUD that the problems that were fixed half a year ago still exist.

"Totally wrong. Every copy of OSX is a FULL version, not an upgrade."

Ugg...

I'm saying, *in practice*, the OSX retail boxes are upgrades. Good grief.


"Any OSX you purchase can be used on a clean drive and do a full install, so the comparison is fair."

But the Mac had a Mac OS on it at some point, right? Meaning that Apple already received payment for an OS on that particular computer (even if the price of the OS was included with the original purchase of the Mac).

(Just in case your suggesting that the upgrade versions of Vista don't allow clean installs, the Vista upgrade versions have the same bits as the full versions and can be used to perform clean installs. But idiotically/greedily, Microsoft makes you have to keep the old OS DVD around so that if you need to reinstall Vista upgrade, you need to install the old OS, then do a clean Vista install over that (it's still clean since it wipes the old OS before installing the Vista upgrade, but it's stupid that you have to keep the old OS dvd around and perform two-step reinstallation process (there is (or at least, was) a work-around to this nonsense))


"Heck, you can even performa full install of OSX on a non-Apple x86 piece of hardware if you are willing to go through and perform the hack."

That's not the case in practice nor is it how Apple wants you to use it. Part of the reason for the low price is that Apple already got money for the hardware, which isn't the case in your scenario. I think your scneario is also against Apple's EULA. In which case I can come back at you with "if you are willing to go through and perform the hack you can pirate Vista and install it for free on as many computers as you want."

Edited 2007-11-16 19:50