Bear with me, this will be long.
I'm assuming you've updated to Vista SP1, and that is what i believe is causing the problem.
I don't think i'm the only one to notice this, but i haven't heard anyone else say it anywhere else. Microsoft (before SP1) was having issues with agonizingly slow data copy speed. SP1 fixed this, but I think Microsoft cheated to accomplish it. The progress bar you see on the screen, doesn't actually indicate how long until your data copy has finished, but rather, from what i can tell, how long until your data copy has reached main memory cache.
This is purely my own speculation but it's the only way i can explain what i'm seeing and how Microsoft improved completion times.
You'll notice if you have a RAM monitoring application or task manager open, that when you do a big file copy, your RAM usage steadily climbs. From what i can tell, Microsoft has made the memory caching of file system transfers more agressive (if not limitless).
So, to confirm my personal observation, watch your memory usage, and start a file copy, you should see your memory usage climb quickly. Meanwhile, your hard drive should be busy writing the data copy to the new location. Assuming you don't run out of memory or there is some other kind of error, watch the progress bar to see when it completes, when it's done, your memory usage should have peaked, your hard drive will still be busily chugging away, and you'll see your ram usage fall in chunks, 40-50MB at a time (like a hard drive write). The progress bar has finished, but you're still seeing the data that was in main memory being written to the hard drive, so they're lying, the copy is not complete. So depending on how big the file is, you can wait 5, 10, 15 seconds or more until the cache in main memory has cleared.
That's what i think the issue you're experiencing is.
The other thing of note is, with 2GB of memory, make sure you have not disabled your pagefile, unless you have 4GB of memory, a pagefile, will help with memory short comings.
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by: purplepomegranitePosted on 2008-06-07 at 15:59:03ID: 21737000
There are a couple of solutions I can think of:
1. Go back to Windows XP (no really, I actually mean this!). I have Vista on a test computer, and have done since it was released. I will not yet put it on a production machine or indeed advise anyone to upgrade or purchase it.
2. Use a third party utility to copy the data, or a commandline utility (e.g. xcopy).