After a lot of pressure, Microsoft gave in and made Vista Service Pack 1 available earlier than promised at the following address:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/bb608344.aspx

I did install it and to be frank I didn’t see many changes except for one: I used to have a frequent blue screen blamed on the ATI video drivers that so far has not happened yet.

There have been many reports on the internet on how slow file copy can be under Vista. I’ve seen such things myself, like an estimate that it will take centuries to copy a simple file.

Furthermore, I’ve been a victim of another file copy issue: a message stating that “there are not enough systems resources” to do the file copy.

I still don’t know how Microsoft managed to botch file copy, something that can be accomplished in a few tenths lines of code, if that much. Fast and trouble-free file copy has been around since CP/M and DOS in the 1980s. I suspect that DRM has something to do with it, but I have no hard evidence.

Anyway, I managed to find ways around those issues.

1)Using “copy /z” or “xcopy/z”

You can open a command prompt and use the “/Z” option of file copy commands – both “xcopy” and “copy” have it. “/Z” stands for “Copies networked files in restartable mode”. I don’t have a clue what that is supposed to mean but you get rid of the dreaded “lack of system resources” messages.

You can use “RoboCopy”, a tool from the Windows 2003 resource kit. It’s available from Microsoft Downloads, but you should use the “/Z” option as well, so it’s not a big advantage. Further, Robocopy only copies whole directories, not single files.

2)Teracopy

The above tools are command line utilities, something quite old fashioned today. Teracopy (http://www.codesector.com) is a free utility that integrates with the Windows shell and allows you to do familiar copy and paste operations in a better way. I found it to be faster and without the “lack of system resources” problem.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to a recent article by Mark Russinovich at http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx on this very issue: file copying under Vista and new stuff on SP1. The article is excellent as usually are things written by Mark. My impression after reading the article is that Microsoft indeed botched file copy. They tried to be much too smart, probably didn’t test it as well as they should have and left us in this state of affairs. SP1 changes a lot of things back to the way XP did. As they say in Brazil in an awkward translation: “when the smartness is much too big it turns itself into a beast and eats the owner”.