I've been using Vista Ultimate as my primary OS now for nearly a year and, I have to say I'm having VERY FEW problems. Certainly not the horror stories you read all over the web and, really no more than I had with Windows XP Pro. It may have something to do with the machine I built to run Vista. (It gets a 5.4 on the Windows Experience Index)
I get no system freezes, no “blue screens“, I've not had to reinstall the OS to make it work again, I can still remote into the systems I manage… Really it's been very reliable. In fact my only REAL Problem is the lack of a driver for my HP Color Laserjet 1500L.. But that too had a work around.
The only things that really bothered me were: Copying files from disk to disk and extracting zip files.
Extracting zips… Extracting Zipfiles using the built in Zip utility was, to say the least, painful. A file that would take a few seconds in XP takes MINUTES in Vista. I couldn't find a solution to fix this in Windows so, I downloaded and installed 7-Zip. That eased all zip Problems. I highly recommend it!
Slow file copying… Well, I've done some digging and found that, for large files, the problem is caused by a new feature called Auto Tuning which is by default enabled in Microsoft Windows Vista.
What Auto Tuning does is that it reacts on changes in the network by tuning the receive windows size. The solution would be of course to disable Auto Tuning in Vista.
To disable Auto Tuning and speed up the copy process and avoid timeouts and disconnects do the following:
Open a command prompt (as Administrator) and type the following:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
To turn it on again:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
For small files.. Files with sizes 1-2KB try:
Go to the Control Panel
Open Programs and Features
Click on " Turn windows features on or off" on the left side of the panel
Uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"
I'm currently testing both changes and so far have seen VERY Good results.. File copying speeds have increased dramatically and there have been no unforeseen side-effects. (yet) I'll keep you posted.
© 2008 – 2009, Robert Owen. All rights reserved.
