photo credit: flattop341
I’ve downloaded and installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1. I’ve been running Vista Home Edition and Ultimate Edition for a bout one year now. The file copy, file zipping and unzipping and file deleting are sometimes super duper slow and has been discussed by many. I decided to check out what’s changed with the zipping and unzipping of folders and files.
Vista Folder Compression
Zipping files in Vista has been an ok experience for me. I took a folder with over 2,200 files of mostly small (<100KB) to medium-sized (between 100KB and less than 1MB) files, right-clicked on the folder and selected Send To…, then Compressed (zipped) Folder. It took about 3 minutes to zip up the files. Not too bad. It took 7-Zip about the same amount of time. So I’m good with that.
Vista File Extractor
Don’t do it!! Vista’s unzipper is extremely slow. We’ve known this for a while now. But how slow is it? Even after installing Vista SP1 on Vista Home Edition as well as Vista Ultimate Edition, the performance wasn’t much better. I tried to unzip the same zipped up file containing over 2,200 files as above.
I started the file extracting process by right-clicking on the zipped file and selecting Extract All… I knew the process was slow from the orgininal release of Vista and, well, nothings changed after installing SP1.
After starting the process and seeing that Vista was going to take up to 12 hours to unzip it, I decided to go grocery shopping which took about 50 minutes. When I came back, Vista reported it would be a remaining 2+ hours to finishing unzipping. Remember this is after letting it unzip for 50 minutes.
So I canceled the unzip process and realized that Vista hasn’t changed as far as unzipping files go. Even with SP1 installed.
I downloaded 7-Zip . 7-Zip is a file archiving program and it unzipped the 2,200+ files in under 1 minute. Well, at least that tells us there’s a strong need for a third-party market when it comes to Vista. 🙂
Leave a Reply