Fix Slow File Copying in Vista

Introduction

Unlike in most of my articles for Vista, there’s no magic potion or Registry edit that will fix what ails file copying speed in Vista. It improved in Service Pack 1, but it’s still lackluster compared to XP. In this case, the best fix is not using Vista’s file copy procedure at all – use instead a separate application that works better. Let’s look at using the freeware application Windows FastCopy by Hiroaki Shirouzu.

After becoming used to eye-candy in Vista, seeing a traditional programmer’s mature utility application can be a bit of a shock. There seems to be a lot going on in FastCopy.

After the distribution file is downloaded from the link above and unzipped (right-click and select Extract All in Vista), a number of files are created.

Double-clicking setup.exe starts the installation process.

In shell mode, FastCopy installs itself as a service in Vista. This means that it can appear natively in the right-click menu of files, and it can minimize to the system tray. Selecting right-click, Copy (FastCopy) on a file brings up the main FastCopy window. Unfortunately, it appears in the center of the screen and does not seem to remember the last dimensions it was dragged into.

This warning always appears: “Behavior changes whether there is \ on the tail after specification of DestDir. Please refer to help for details by pushing the “?” button.” (The question-mark button appears to the right of the Buffer size window.) The warning itself deals with copying the contents of a directory or the directory itself.

• If the source directory, shown to the right of the the Source button, ends in a backslash, FastCopy copies the contents of the directory to the target directory.
• If the source directory does not end in a black-slash, FastCopy copies the directory itself AND its contents to the target directory.

Clicking the down-arrow on the Diff (Size/Date) button brings up the other modes of operation.

Diff (No Overwrite) – if the same filename exists in the target directory, FastCopy does not copy the file.

Diff (Size/Date) – if the same filename exists in the target directory, FastCopy copies only when the size or date is different from the same filename in the target directory. This is the default.

Diff (Update) – if the same filename exists in the target directory, FastCopy copies only when the source’s file date is newer.

Copy (Overwrite) – FileCopy always copies, regardless of the files’ dates and sizes.

Move (Overwrite) – FileCopy always copies, and the original file is deleted.

Delete – The specified files and directories are deleted.

FastCopy does not use the operating system's cache for copying, so you can specify the amount of memory to use for the “Buffer.” The default is 32 MB, but if you need to copy large files and have commodious memory installed, you can increase this.

The slider right below the buffer setting allows you to specify the speed control from “Suspend,” to a percentage, to Auto Slow, which makes it adjust speed based on other activity on the PC such as mouse movement or a change in the active window, and, of course, Full Speed ahead.

“Nonstop” means continue despite any read/write errors. “Verify” means verify the destination file after writing. “Estimate” means give an estimation of when the operation will finish before starting the copy.

“ACL” means copy the Access Control List attributes of the files. This would be normal for Vista’s file system, and you should select it, but if you were copying to FAT, you may want to turn this off. Likewise, “AltStream,” or alternate stream is a feature of Vista’s NTFS. Alternate streams are used to contain things like thumbnails for an image or formatting data for a document. Alternate streams are fine to include when writing to NTFS volumes, but Vista will ignore them when writing to a flash drive, CD-R, or FAT file system drive. Thus it‘s safe to select this in Vista.

The “Elevate” button in the top row means “elevate privilege.” If you have User Access Control active on your Vista PC and select this, Vista won’t like it at all. It’ll say “An unidentified program wants access to your computer.” If this happens, just click “X” in the top right of the warning dialog to close it.

Next: Filters, Settings, and Using FastCopy in Portable Mode