Thursday January 22
 
00:35
 
Speedtest

XP via Wifi; laptop:

Vista via Wifi; laptop:

 

Vista via LAN; desktop:

Both machines are connected to the same Wifi router – one by Wifi, one by LAN. Slower Ping seems to be a Vista/XP difference.

Saturday January 10
 
11:48
 
Crimson Herring

It appears I was wrong about Syncback SE causing this problem.

While the problem occurred with Syncback SE, I was also able to reproduce the issue just doing a plain network copy. It appears to be an issue copying between Vista and one of my NAS drives – the same drive which required the configuration change to get authentication to work. My other NAS drives work fine, both with copy and Syncback.

After a random amount of time – somewhere between 5 to 20 minutes usually – copying files to that NAS (a Netorage), the computer will just lock up. No screen output, no reaction from the keyboard, can’t remote login via logmein. It’s not in sleep or hibernation, but it’s not working – the only option is to reboot.

I’m not best chuffed that Vista and my NAS don’t play well together. Vista really shouldn’t crash so badly, and, more importantly, it’s the only NAS I have which both accepts Korean characters and has enough disk space to be my backup NAS. I wonder if it will work with XP under virtualisation?

Wednesday January 7
 
15:50
 
Confused

Last night I replaced Vista Home Premium 64 with Vista Ultimate 64 on my home PC… and my Vista graphics score dropped 0.3 points.

Both installs were clean installs, both using the exact same drivers, both are SP1 and updated via Windows Update with all the latest updates, both are 64 bit – yet a difference of 0.3 points. I don’t get it. I tried playing about with drivers to get the score from Ultimate to match Premium but it doesn’t budge.

Update: No Longer Confused

I finally found what was causing the difference. From 0.3 points, 0.2 points was lost because I had a second monitor plugged it. Even though the second monitor wasn’t powered on, it seems like the display was being mirrored.

The final 0.1 was reclaimed when I removed Microsoft Dreamscene. I can’t think of anything more pointless than an animated desktop – if I’d know what it was, I would never have downloaded it in the first place. I’m surprised Dreamscene reduces the Vista graphics score by 0.1. I mean, if it makes a difference to performance, you’d think the score would drop by more than 0.1. And why should just having it installed make a difference? I’m not running it.

Final score:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 5.2
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 3.5
Gaming graphics: 3323 MB Total available graphics memory 3.6
Primary hard disk: 36GB Free (70GB Total) 5.4
Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate

Base score 3.5
Determined by lowest subscore

System

Manufacturer: System manufacturer
Model System: Product Name
Total amount of system memory: 8.00 GB RAM
System type: 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores: 2

Storage

Total size of hard disk(s) 549 GB
Disk partition (C:) 36 GB Free (70 GB Total)
Disk partition (D:) 70 GB Free (199 GB Total)
Disk partition (E:) 129 GB Free (279 GB Total)

Graphics

Display adapter type: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
Total available graphics memory: 3323 MB
Dedicated graphics memory: 256 MB
Dedicated system memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 3067 MB
Display adapter driver version: 8.510.0.0
Primary monitor resolution: 1920×1200
DirectX version: DirectX 10

Network

Network Adapter: Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0)
Network Adapter: Microsoft Tun Miniport Adapter

I’m pretty happy with that. The lower score is the graphics, and given that I’ve not played a single game in the last two years, that doesn’t bother me at all. Aero, HD playback, etc are all sweet.
 

 

Monday January 5
 
15:57
 
Running All Night

Running All Night

I left Vista running last night with the monitors switched off and copying files to a NAS. The machine was still working this morning – yet more evidence that Syncback SE was the issue.

Update 10th Jan 2009: While Syncback SE did show this issue, it doesn’t appear to be Syncback SE’s fault. Read here.

However there was a different error and I wonder if it could be related (ie. it is an error which Syncback SE doesn’t handle gracefully): the file copy stopped midway with an error claiming Vista couldn’t read the source disk.

This is strange because the source disk is a local disk. I could understand the NAS communication failing, but not the source disk. From searching google, I see others having a similar issue with Vista. However my files are in the 5-10MB range rather than the multi-GB range. I am copying thousands of them though, so it may be related.

Unfortunately I no longer have the exact wording of the error and I realise now that I wont be able to get the error back because I selected “don’t bug me”. Doh. Hopefully I’ll be able to reproduce it on my second Vista machine.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that copying files over the network is slower than I expected under Vista, as is internet browsing (connection speed, etc). This happens on both my Vista machines. Over 100Mbit lan I’m only getting a speed of around 1-2MB/s doing file copy, and about half of that via Wifi.

On the advice of several sites, I’ve switched off auto tuning:

1. Click: Start
2. Type cmd in the search box and finish with ctrl/shift/enter
3. Enter: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

This seems to improve things by about 20% via Wifi. I’ve yet to test it via Lan.

One of the nice things about Vista is that it reports speeds in MB/s. But it’s a double edged sword. Even thought I’ve tested copying to/from a USB2 HDD in XP and Vista and know Vista to be faster, I still perceive it as slower when I see Vista only reporting 15-20MB/s copy speed. I wonder if that is causing me to perceive network file copy as slower also.

Sometimes I really don’t think Vista helps itself get a good reputation. For example, after seeing the USB copy speed I looked into the USB driver setup on my machine to check everything was installed OK and found USB Root Hub reporting “Hub is operating at full-speed”. In USB2 terms, “full speed” means 1.5MB/s, rather than the 60MB/s of “high speed”. However clearly the hub is operating at high speed otherwise I wouldn’t reach 15-20MB/s, so why report it using the USB2 “full speed”? It’s confusing.

Priority at the moment is tuning the network and then installing encryption on my drives. I had a USB hard drive failure earlier this week and I wasn’t too pleased about having to return the disk without being able to wipe it completely. Not that I have much to be secret about, I just don’t like the thought of personal files, photos, etc being open to prying eyes.

Sunday January 4
 
23:24
 
Red Herrings

The thing about red herrings is that they’re not red and they don’t smell like fish, but they do hurt when you’re being slapped in the face with them.

It turns out my strange issue was nothing to do with my monitor or my install, but a program that I had trusted in XP crashing its bollocks off under Vista.

The program with sore bollocks is Syncback SE. I used to run the non-SE version in XP. What Syncback does is this: point it at a source directory and a destination directory and every time you run it it will copy the changed files from source to destination. Worked a charm in XP. Works like Dark Magic, it seems, under Vista 64-bit.

Building a PC was my New Year vacation ”project”. As long as I never hit this problem again, I’ll be happy – because today was the end of my NY vacation! I’ll try Syncback (non-SE version) to see whether it works OK, but I certainly wont be using Syncback SE again.

Update 10th Jan 2009: While Syncback SE did show this issue, it doesn’t appear to be Syncback SE’s fault. Read here.