If you do a Google search for slow upload speed Windows Vista you will get about 75,000 hits.

Now, I'm not whining because my upload speed is a bit slower than my download speed. I'm talking about total unusability, like taking several DAYS to upload a 5MB picture to Shutterfly, or hours to upload a 200K picture to this bbs.

This problem began when I built my new computer with Windows Vista. Nothing else changed, same DSL line, same ISP, etc. I had hoped that it would go away now that I am in California for a while (drove down from Alaska in a 37 year old school bus packed with all my worldly belongings, but that's a tale for another thread) but the problem remains.

I am currently connected to the internet through a cable modem, networked through a Linksys router with SWMBO's Macintosh. My download speed is about 6 times faster than it was on my DSL line in Alaska. SWMBO can upload files through the same router and cable modem that I am on at "normal" upload speeds. I cannot.

So it would seem pretty definitive that the problem lies with my computer, and that there are tens of thousands of other Vista users with the same problem. No-one seems to have come up with a solution.

I turned off my firewall protection as some of the Google articles suggested, to no avail. (It is now back on.)

Oh, wait... at long last Vista SP1 is available for my computer, I'm installing it now. I am not optimistic that it will solve the problem.

Does anybody here know of a solution to this?

tanstaafl.

Upgrade to XP? Or Linux?

Do you have more than 1 network card in the computer running Vista?


Edit:
Try this
http://www.ads-links.com/index.php/how-to-fix-windows-vista-slow-network-transfer.html

It's usually (in my limited experience) solved by changing the drivers. A friend of mine had the same issue with his HP tablet laptop, but when he tried to go to XP, he found that drivers didn't exist for the laptop in XP. When he re-installed vista, and installed all the latest drivers, everything was fast. No idea which driver was the culprit, but that's all that really changed.

Oh man, one of the FIRST things I do on any new laptop is run PC Decrapifier on it.

Not practical. I have many Windows-specific programs I run, and while the idea of "upgrading" to XP is tempting, the amount of work required to re-install all the software and get all the settings tweaked back the way I want them is simply too daunting.

tanstaafl.

Hmmm... you may be onto something there. I seem to recall installing a wireless network card in addition to the networking on the motherboard. Could this be the problem?



Nope -- been there, done that (turning off the firewall), didn't help.

However... Installing the SP1 update did help the situation. Didn't resolve it completely, but helped. After installing SP1, the file I wanted to upload to Shutterfly did upload, took a few seconds over four minutes, a big improvement over the several days it would have taken before (judging by the percentage shown on the progress bar when I tried it).

SWMBO's Macintosh uploaded the same file, across the same network/router/modem to the same website in 15 seconds. That's only 16 times faster than Vista would do it.

Tomorrow I'll pull that wireless card out of the computer and see if things work any better, but I think maybe they won't because in order to get the router to work when I set up the network with my computer and SWMBO's with the cable modem I had to go into control panel and disable the wireless networking.

We'll see...

tanstaafl.

Here I will display my ignorance... but how do I know if I have the latest drivers (they were the latest ones when the computer was built last September) and where would I go to update them?

tanstaafl.

What motherboard does CPU-Z say you have? What videocard did you get? Did you get any other PCI, AGP or PCI-E devices? What about raid for the HD's are you using it?

I found some interesting info, have your trying turning off the network autotune feature?
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/03/22...blems-in-vista/

If that doesn't work try reading this forum thread at 2cpu
http://forums.2cpu.com/archive/index.php/t-83112.html

More daunting then continuing to find issue after issue with Vista, having to dig deeper into the unknown when things aren't working compared to the way they used to on the older Windows? Yes, I'm admittedly a big OS X guy now, but I still have to deal with Windows on a frequent basis at home and work.

I finally got tired of trying to live with Vista (After trying really hard for nearly a year) when:

1. Network performance sucked, and continued to suck post SP1, with new drivers, and on completely different hardware. Much like your issue, it was very noticible, and vanished when going to XP on the same hardware. The auto-tuning being turned off helped, but never got network speeds to what XP could do.

2. Sound drivers are still a mess. Even post SP1 and nearly 18 months after Vista went gold, I couldn't route the line in sound to the speakers on my desktop at work (how I listen to the empeg). Going back to XP worked, after trying endless combinations of various registry hacks and driver versions.

3. Buggy display drivers that bluescreen the box at the drop of a hat. This has gotten much better since NVidia and Microsoft got their acts together and released a few hotfixes and new drivers. However, something is still clearly borked when Aero is allowed to eat 2.9 gigs of RAM.

4. Unexplained differences in basic things like file permissions over a network, leading to a folder I can delete off the NAS on XP, but not on Vista.

5. Changes to how the screen lock works, to cause it to take a really long time to unlock a workstation under heavy load.

6. Slower disk performance on the same hardware as XP. Again bad enough to notice.

7. Worthless and problematic file and registry virtualization tied to a completely unrelated and worthless security system built to annoy users. Sure, I turned UAC off as a first step to get around being annoyed while not being provided any real security, so it worked around the bugs in the virtualization stuff.

All of this discovered by trying to use Vista as a primary windows box, but secondary work machine. I cringe to think the other issues I would have had if I depended on it for e-mail, word processing and other tasks as well above and beyond the development work I do on the machine. Not all of it might be a direct problem caused by Vista, however I see it as a problem MS needs to help address if driver writers can't get the same functionality and stability out of the same hardware due to MS rewriting so many core services with no noticeable benefit.

As far as I'm concerned, if a migration path to OS X isn't possible (and it is very easy with VMWare and such), and staying in Windows hell is required, at least stick to XP long enough to see Windows 7 make it out. The problems in Vista clearly cannot be addressed by the service pack team at Microsoft, so maybe the core OS team will fix the issues in the next paid version. Similar to how the service pack team couldn't fix the death star sized security holes in XP (MS had the core OS team work on SP2, hence one of the many reasons for Vista's delay, and possible problems), I don't trust them to fix serious Vista issues either, since SP1 didn't do much for the 7 issues above.

Which is odd, since (as far as I can tell) the bulk of Vista SP1 was done by the core OS team -- the Vista SP1 kernel is essentially the Windows 2008 kernel.

I forgot about that. And indeed that does make it even more strange. Though I suppose if the core OS team was mostly focused on server 2008, and only really helped on the kernel in Vista, it could explain why the non server issues above are the worst of the bunch. IE the Aero, sound, screen lock, and UAC/Virtualization issues. The networking is probably close enough now, but still annoying that it is a step backwards in both Doug and my environments.

Vista frustrates me to no end mostly because it shows how far off track MS has gone. They still dominate the PC market, so a ton of people still have to deal with their issues. There was a time, even when I was switching to OS X that the talk about Longhorn excited me. It seemed like it was going to be a good step forward for the Windows world, adding a lot of good tech under the hood, a lot of interesting consumer features. 18 months after release, I still wonder what happened.

I've been thinking quite seriously about setting up 2008 server as my primary workstation. I just haven't had the time, or the drive space lately.

I have been running vista and 2008 server from the day of RTM, and 2008 server seems like everything vista should of been. Good thing I've got 1500 activations of 2008 servers on my MSDN account

Unfortunately, for device drivers you have to go to each individual component's website and find the new drivers, if there are any. They seem to be rolling them out pretty fast since Vista shipped. It is very likely that there are newer drivers for almost every component in the PC. I'd start with network, then move on to controllers, video, etc.

You win.

After yet another Vista frustration (maybe a DLL file somehow got corrupted or something) where one of my primary programs will no longer run, even after uninstalling and re-installing the program!) I have given up, "Bitt" the bullet so to speak, and a few minutes ago ordered a brand new copy of Windows XP Pro.

My system is configured with four hard drives: A small (75 GB) C: drive, and three 300 GB data drives in D:, E:, and F:. Currently the F: drive is empty and has enough room to store all the data on C:, D:, and E:.

So, when my XP CD arrives, what do I do? Is it as simple as doing a full system backup to my F: drive, then erasing the C: drive, putting the CD into the H: drive (that's my CD/DVD drive) and following the directions?

How do I erase the C: drive? Do I reformat the disk? Apparently not...

* Formatting a volume will destroy any data on the partition. Be sure to make backups of any data you want to save before you begin.

* You cannot format a disk or partition that is currently in use, including the partition that contains Windows.

* Quick format is a formatting option that creates a new file table but does not fully overwrite or erase the volume. A quick format is much faster than a normal format, which fully erases any existing data on the volume.

Do I go to a C:> prompt (not a trivial task in Windows Vista!) and type in FDISK? No...

'fdisk' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file.

So how do I nuke and repave this Vista POS?

edit: I read that XP doesn't have drivers for SATA drives. I'm not certain what my D: E: & F: drives are. "Properties" tells me they are "MAXTOR S TM3320620AS SCSI Disk Device", but I am pretty sure they are not SCSI drives. Google lists that drive designation as being ATA, SATA, and SCSI, so I'm not sure what to think. If they are SATA, will that be a problem? My C: drive is listed as being ATA.

tanstaafl.

Windows installation disks are bootable. You configure the computer's BIOS so that it will boot from the CD-ROM drive. At that point, you simply follow the instructions. It will show you that drive C: already has windows on it, and you use a nice GUI interface (all built-in to the CD setup program) to wipe that disk and put fresh Windows on it.

The fun part starts as soon as Windows XP is booted and there are a billion unrecognized pieces of hardware on the system, and you're now into the trawl-for-drivers-for-three-days mode.

Can such a cd be copied onto a hard drive, the drive attached to the computer drive cable, IDE for example, and an install take place, the destination being the other drive on the cable.

I've no doubt it would work with linux (exposing possible cluelessness) but windows?

Specifically I have a laptop which can't be booted from anything but the hard drive. The pc-card slot was destroyed some time ago, and there is no bios option for anything but that.

That's a good question. XP CDs probably boot via El Torito. El Torito discs have a disk image at the beginning of them. If you could extract that disk image and put it on a hard drive, it should boot. But I don't know at that point how it would handle CDROM access. It might then load CDROM-specific drivers and talk to the drive directly. Or it might not and try to do something crazy to the disk with the image. You could give it a shot. I seriously doubt that you can do it just by copying the disk image though (although that's obviously the path of least resistance, so worth a shot). There's probably a tool out there somewhere to extract the El Torito boot image from a CDROM image, but I don't know where it might be.

I recognize that I'm rambling, but there might be some useful information in there somewhere.

Yes. It's called an "unattended install". Search for it on Technet. It's usually not worth the bother for a single PC, though.

I can give much better help over the phone but will post what I can.

Can you move all your data around so that one of your 300GB HD's is blank? I would recommend making a complete backup to the drive that is bootable. This is mostly only needed if you use IE, Outlook or Outlook Express as it is much easier to get your data moved to a new install if you still have it working. I would use Acronis True Image but it costs money. Here is a free program I've heard works DriveImage XML but I haven't tried it.

XP can install to SATA hard drives but it needs the drivers. I use tools to slipstream drivers and the latest service pack into one CD. This helps lower the total install time as your not spending hours installing updates. You can find out more about slipstreaming here.

When installing XP it will get to a spot that shows all of your drives and will ask where do you want to install XP. This is where you would delete the current partition on your 75 GB drive. You would then create a new partition and format NTFS quick. You can pick the NTFS normal but it really isn't needed.

Usually being that the PC would have a functional CD drive available to boot from.

Not necessarily; imaging over the network works fine. Alternatively, take the disk out and pre-populate it from in another machine.

Might as well add a #8 to my list. Vista can't deal with multiple video cards that use different drivers. IE, you can't install an ATI 2600 XT and an NVidia 8800 GT into a system and have monitors attached to both function.

OS X, and XP, not a problem. OS X even lets me move 3d apps between the screens seamlessly.

Now I have a reason to try and get XP 64 working on this Mac Pro for Boot Camp. The lack of Apple supported drivers for XP 64 caused me to try to live with Vista for wintendo purposes, but it seems it fails at that task too.