With the right hardware, Windows Vista is pretty cool. I've been running Vista x64 for almost a year now. The media would have you believe that everyone hates Vista. It is commonly referred to as being buggy and unstable. That is simple not true. Vista has problems, but I've not seen one mainstream news source address one of Vista's "real" issues. One of these real issues for me has been file transfer speed. Some of which has been address in SP1.

I wasn't very happy with Vista when I saw my network performance fall from around 80 MB/sec with XP to around 10 MB/sec with Vista. I've had similar experiences, for instance when I moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. During that move I switched from my much beloved SCSI disk interface to the IDE disk interface. XP had serious issues with SCSI systems which resulted in poorer performance than their IDE counterparts.

Over the next few months of running Vista I finally discovered certain application, specifically ones that dealt with audio played a huge role in affecting the speed of file transfer, especially when transferring files over a network. With some of the resent Vista updates, transferring large files became manageable, while still inconvenient. For instant if I were going to move some large files, I might hang up my call on Skype or close any applications where were playing audio. There are some application that greatly affect the file transfer speed that don't appear to be using audio. I noticed the Steam client for Valve games really kills transfer speed. Kill the application while transferring a large file and watch a huge boost in your transfer speed.

Today I installed the service pack one release candidate (SP1 RC) for Vista x64. 

Copy a file from drive to drive has a huge increase in performance. I was getting around 60 MB/sec.

Transferring the same file while talking on Skype slows it down a bit.

Copying from Vista to a local server is around the same performance as patched Vista system before SP1 RC. An un-patched systems has horrible performance (around 10 MB/sec).

Talking on Skype still kills my file transfer speed over a network though. Other applications that involve audio and the Steam client exhibit the same symptoms.

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