!Why the hell is Vista slow slow at extracting zip

files? I have a 6MB zip file made with Winzip, and I'm on the Vista laptop which does not have Winzip installed and when I try to extract it, it says it will take 30 minutes! Is this some kind of crippling? It's just crazy, it should take 3 seconds. Anyone else had this or is it the laptop?

Not sure I've done it in Vista yet. Its slow in XP too, though. Not 30 minutes slow, but slow.

I use WinRAR now, cos its about 20x faster.

[edit] Wait a minute - you said it doesn't have WinZip installed? Doesn't Vista handle ZIP format by default like XP does?

I zipped on a different PC, transfered to the laptop and I'm extracting via Vista's built in zip extract capability. That is what is pig slow.

On my XP PC I use Winzip and WinRar and both are fast.

Yep. Its a well know bug in Vista. Just search the net and you will see lots of people have this problem. I just use winrar or 7zip now. Its much quicker.

Zipped my current project (Standing at 22.4mb) to a size of 10.8mb.

Extraction time of said zip (using the built in zip utility) was 11 seconds!

Vista flavour: Vista Home Premium
CPU: AMD Athlon64 3800+
RAM: 1 1/2 gig

So its fine here!!

Dabz

Get 7zip, assuming there is a Vista version.

I do have occasional problems when deleting files in Vista - I don't know if its related. Sometimes it takes ages to delete a single file, even if its a really small one. It doesn't always do it, though.

My XP has started to play up like this, when i (right click sendto > archive) on a file it takes AGES for the menu to appear like 1 minute sometimes then when i try and build the archive it sits on 0% complete for a long time before actually starting to make the file.

Last time it started doing this the only solution i could find was to re-install windows (yay :/ ) Its started happening again recently. Which is really annoying, if someone knows a fix for this i'd be thankful.

yep looks it's some kind of abysmal Vista problem that only affects certain setups for some reason I haven't got to the bottom of (nor do I intend to). I'll be installing WinRar...

I have this problem too, though I also had it in XP (on a much smaller scale). Vistas file operations are completely screwed really, it takes ages to do anything and the time taken is not proportional to the size of the files you're dealing with. I don't know what they think they're doing really - and I suppose they probably don't know either.

I had this problem in XP too, I ended up by using 7Zip if the file was large.
I thought it might be something scanning the files making it slow like Windows Defender.

Yeah it must be a "Security" feature. It's awful.

Vista is teh suck!

..beautiful..

Try to begin extracting as many large zip archives as you can. On my machine Vista collapses after about 5. WinXP and Win98 survive this.
I'd still like to know why Vista spends at least 90% of the time churning over the harddrive even though you've just let it sit there doing nothing. Vista just sucks, it's that simple.

Grey: supposedly it is much faster if you do a rightclick -> extract on the compressed folder, than it is to drag/drop the contents some where.

I posted the same thing a couple of months ago, where a folder that XP could decompress in less than 2 minutes took over an hour under Vista. It's a known problem, just like the incredibly slow network copying of files. apparently it's the file indexing system running around in circles screaming like a little girl.

Try disabling Windows Defender and, of course, the horrible UAC.

Vista also has some kind of a file versioning system built into its file system, meaning that - in theory - you can restore a specific version of a file. I don't know if this can be turned off, but it certainly "helps" slowing down file system I/Os.

The downside is that switching off all those new security features makes Vista probably even less secure than XP was.

According to some magazines, this is one of the issues that Microsoft announced to address with the forthcoming SP1 for Vista. But since Microsoft is only good at announcing but not at actually shipping products (anyone here remembers the announced Vista killer feature WinFS?), one can only hope for the best.

Vista certainly is not the best OS release from Microsoft, but it is also not the worst, I would say in its defense. For .NET developers, it is definitely the Windows version they have been waiting for. When you do a fresh install on a clean system, you will also experience the fastest Windows installation ever - it usually does not take more than 15 minutes to have a running environment from scratch. That's pretty cool (for Windows).

I gotta leave all the UAC crap on for now to test my games out to make sure they'll work on standard Vista installs :-(

I think thats the "SuperFetch" feature -> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/performance.mspx

Edit: or the automatic defragmentation feature.

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be one of few NOT experiencing any problems with Vista?

Phew! :D

Dabz

Well, there has to be at least one out there :)

Well, I haven't experienced anything that's put me off using it. You can find fault with any OS if you sit picking at it for long enough.

GfK: Did you see my detailed notes about the VirtualStore in my other Vista thread yet? I thought they might prove useful. Although they don't have a solution...it's just a study of the problem.

Great stuff, I thought I was the odd one out there... on the entire planet! :D



*I know your talking to GfK but*

Thanks for that little bit of work on the subject Grey, I havent moved onto filing away highscores yet, so if no solution pops up, this will give me a head start.. much appreciated! ;)

Dabz

I'm guessing Vista uses the MESS file system? lol
(ME Storage System) haha that the funiest joke ive come up with in the last 30 seconds

Dabz: welcome. A solution really is needed. I think Indiepath figured out that you can have the installer make a folder in global location and then everything in that folder can be written to by everyone, but that's no good if the portals use their own installer.