Almost nine months after the release of Vista to business users, Microsoft has finally issued an official update to the OS to cure the slow file copy/delete bug that has been plaguing users for the best part of a year.
The bug, which causes the OS to slow to a painful crawl when copying files between drives (or even worse, crash explorer altogether) has been the subject of vigorous discussion on Microsoft’s own forums, with many sufferers keen to vent their frustration in the hope of spurring Microsoft into producing a remedy.
Carrying the auspicious title of KB938979, the article and attached update will bring effective relief to users of Microsoft’s latest operating system.
Although many think that this patch is long overdue, almost all agree that it is welcome. The patch is expected to make it to the Windows Update site shortly (probably the next Patch Tuesday). Anyway, why wait? Suffer no longer and download it for yourself. Relief is available for users with either the x86 or x64 flavours of Vista, here:
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938979
At the same time, MS also issued a further compatibility and reliability update for Windows Vista. It too has yet to appear on the Windows Update site, but people wishing to find out more and download it now can find it here:
3 responses so far ↓
Ellis // November 13, 2007 at 5:09 pm
It is absolutely pathetic that this has taken this long. Nearly a year into Vista and it’s still unusable for many people. Besides the myriad of little bugs (that when taken collectively are maddening), the wide-range of incompatible applications remains a major hurdle for adoption.
Vista slow file copy delete problem: MS issues official fix // November 28, 2007 at 3:15 pm
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Mark // March 8, 2008 at 9:41 pm
In our IT practice, we have encountered many of the same issues with Vista, and a few others not mentioned on this blog.
With Vista SP1, robocopy is now included since many people were using it to get around Vista’s poor file management programs. However, unlike the version of robocopy in the Win2003 server toolkit, this Vista SP1 version seems thoroughly broken:
–reports file access errors that the good version never reported
–attempts to MODIFY flags on the origin files, a behavior that we never want in Pull-Backups–we want that original PROTECTED!
–hangs if there is any keyboard input in the process window to pause or terminate (control-S, control-C/Break)
–once the Vista SP1 robocopy hangs, you just can’t get rid of it without a reboot–not using TaskKill /F and not through the process monitor.
Microsoft seems to have bombed on their SyncToy 2.0 beta as well since many seem to report similar difficulties.
This all seems to point back to problems in core Vista functions that Microsoft is touting as ‘improvements’ over WinXP that left many such functions up to applications.