Fuck Vista

One of our laptops broke down about a week ago. It was running XP just like every other computer we have.

However, it’s either impossible or expensive these days to buy new laptops with XP running on them. Dell seems to be charging over $100 extra to replace Vista with XP on their laptops. So I bought an Inspiron 1545 running Windows Vista Home Premium.

The laptop arrived last week and it is great, except for the fact that it’s running Vista.

I’m moving the files from the old laptop…it manages to run for about 45 minutes before BSOD…to the new laptop. I’m using my NAS drive to copy files from the old laptop, and eventually onto the new one. I already destroyed an USB drive when the old laptop BSODed during a file transfer. The NAS drive is running on a redundant file system, so if anything goes wrong I won’t lose any of the files.

Anyway, copying the files from the old laptop to the NAS drive was easy…with the frequent BSODs notwithstanding. It’s roughly 10GB of files.

I’m now slowly (you’ll see what I mean in a sec) transferring the files from the NAS onto the new laptop. Normally I’d already be done, but since the laptop is running Vista, this will take me all night, because Microsoft has managed to somehow completely fuck up how it copies files over a network connection.

I’m currently transferring about 65MB of digital photos. I have 42.5MBs left, and the estimated time of completion is 2 hours and 18 minutes. That’s at a speed of 6.95KB/s.

Yes, you read that right. 6.95KB/s. On a LAN.

I get better transfer speeds from a music pirate in Ukraine sharing his electronica collection.

The files are transferring at normal speeds on all the other computers, all of which are running on XP.

Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK!?

I’ve done everything suggested online to fix this issue. Every, single, fucking, thing. Well, except upgrading to XP.

This problem with slow network file operations was noticed two years ago. It hasn’t been fixed, and since it’s not fixed yet I’m assuming it will never be fixed. There are reports out there that suggest the problem exists in Windows 7 as well.

I wonder if Dell would replace Vista with XP, free of charge, if I called their support. I doubt it.

Instead, what I’ll probably do is setup a ftp server on the NAS (it’s running Linux, thank God) and transfer the files that way. It seems as if this “feature” of Vista only happens if you copy files using Windows Explorer. I will probably be able to set that up faster than what it’ll take to copy those remaining 42MB of files.

This is the same reason, btw, why I upgraded from Vista to XP at work over a year ago.

-TPP

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