Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Windows - still stupid after all these years

Now that i am using Windows 7 a lot more for work i am so upset in how useless it is for common tasks. We all knew that file operations were pretty much broken in previous versions, it took forever to do any meaningful stuff with lots of file and it tied up your machine, sort of like working on a beige mac running system 7.

So today i finally got around to do some file maintenance. I attached a 1 terabyte LaCie Quadro external hard disk to the macbook pro using firewire 800 and proceeded to copy about 25 gig of files from the mac to the windows partition. Most of the time was spend figuring out which files to move, the actual 1-5 gig copy operations were complete before i could decide on the next group.

Now i boot the macbook into Windows 7 (boot camp). The external fw800 windows partition shows up. It is a simple task to copy the 25 gig worth of files from the external drive to another external drive hooked up (also a LaCie but firewire 400 formatted for windows). How long do you think this operation would take? I think i spend about 30 minutes last time i did it on Linux (in fairness the linux box has an e-sata connection).

Well, it's been 10 minutes and Windows is still thinking about the copy operation, it actually hasn't even started yet! And the copy dialog box estimates 16 hours! It says 'discovered' 5,764 items and then sits and sits and sits.

In fairness the previous osx copy was between laptop hard drive and external hard disk and this is from external hard disk to external hard disk but 16 hours?

When i do similar file operations on the windows 7 desktop it is slow and ties up the machine. How can that be on a dual 3.2 ghz xeon box with 4 cores? Obviously it is not hyperthreaded - why?

Update

It's 10:15 am the next day and 1,700 files still to be copied, says 9 hours to go! It finally completed this afternoon. I am now moving some files around on the external drive connected to the win 7 pc and every so often it has to re-read the directory from the drive. There is a green progress bar across the top of the file manager and it takes a couple of minutes to read the directory of the 1tb external. No wonder file operations take so long.

1 comment:

gnickers said...

I switched the windows 7 drive and video card to the same model of computer (dell 470) and had to fiddle with the bios settings to get it to boot. Windows started but complained of missing drivers and having to fix the boot process. When you select repair it just shows a directory of obtuse file names from which you have to select drivers. By comparison the machine i switched with is a ubuntu box which booted as if nothing had been changed. Again, these are the same models of the same machine.