Vista Zip Slow and Broken?

Posted At : May 20, 2007 10:16 PM
Related Categories: Web Dev, GRRR

Anyone notice how really really slow unzipping a file is with Vista? I was downloading ColdBox to play with. a) it took forever to extract the files b) the extraction failed with all kinds of errors. It looked as though it was having issue with unencrypted files and files writing over themselves. (side note coldbox looks really interesting and has great docs and sample files)

I finally gave up on the built in Vista utility and downloaded 7zip. Quick install, free, and worked perfectly. No errors, and did the same task in a fraction of the time. These are the little things that kill this OS.

Earlier today I couldn't register my version of CuteFTP. Apparently my user account (with administrator privileges) didn't have ENOUGH privileges to write something to the registry and thus my registration kept failing. I still haven't got that sorted out yet. Do I blame the makers of CuteFTP or Vista? Maybe a combo of the two. Bah I say. Bah.

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I have not had any problems with the unzip function built in with Vista, maybe it was something isolated to your install or that package? I am a big proponent of 7zip however. But interestingly I still keep the ZIP extension association with Vista's decompression.

As for the CuteFTP registration problem did you run it in administrator mode? Even though you have an administrator account, it still has security restrictions. The administrator account is not the same as root on Linux for example. Right click the shortcut or program and 'Run as Administrator'

# Posted By Ben | 5/20/07 9:15 PM

I still stick with winrar myself, but I've heard <a href="www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000799.html&quo... things about 7 zip</a>. I had the same zip problems on XP myself though. I remember canceling an eclipse unzip after about 20 minutes only to see it complete in no time at all with winrar.

# Posted By Adam Fortuna | 5/20/07 10:30 PM

uh yeah- It's painfully slow. My computer overall is sluggish though with a recent Vista install on a brand new hard Drive. Kind of upsettting. And my Firefox keeps crashing!!

# Posted By diamondTearz | 5/21/07 1:05 AM

With CuteFTP I finally looked up the KB article to figure out what to do, ran it as administrator. But at that point I had 'tried too many times' and cuteftp permanently locked me out. Now I need to contact globalscape to figure out how to reset my install. Anyone want to recommend a free FTP program?

# Posted By Joshua Cyr | 5/21/07 8:31 AM

Thanks for the HELP! I went from 4-6 hours to unzip to less than a min for a 40MB zip in Vista.

# Posted By Rohn | 6/7/07 12:04 PM

Rohn,

Wow, that time is ridiculous! Shocking even.

# Posted By Joshua Cyr | 6/7/07 12:40 PM

I was seeing similar times with zip on Vista. Everything else was very responsive, but I was unzipping a file that was only 100 compressed files at about 40MB total and it took 40 minutes...

# Posted By Adam | 6/15/07 11:28 AM

Extracting with Vista is painfully slow for me too, what's up with that. I use 7Zip, it takes about 1/4 the time to extract zips.

# Posted By CStick | 7/16/07 12:02 AM

I had the same issue. It's absurd that Vista's zip utility sucks. The number one thing I noticed is that the utility wasn't using any resources. Maybe Microsoft thought it was more important to us that the utility not get in the way than that it actually be good at unzipping files? Who knows...

# Posted By Adam MIller | 8/12/07 4:19 PM

I was having an extremely hard time with Vista's zip functionality. I was unzipping a 262 MB file, and it was decompressing at 2 BYTES per second (yes, bytes!). 7zip extracted at a healthy 20 MB per second, and it was done in less than 30 seconds.

# Posted By Ben | 8/14/07 10:40 AM

I am told that Vista will have a patch very soon to address this. No idea if it will work well. Also not certain if this is a service pack, or simply some hotfixes.

# Posted By Joshua Cyr | 8/14/07 10:46 AM

vista's zip really sucked. thanks for mentioning 7-zip. Vista took whole night to unzip 200mb zip, 7z didnt even take 20 minutes. its cool

# Posted By kunal | 10/10/07 10:14 PM

infact it dint even take 5 minutes :) i was completely unaware about this amazing utility, thanks once again..

# Posted By kunal | 10/10/07 10:17 PM

I had the same problem with extremely slow unzip on Vista. Switching off indexing facility for the drive and search service solved the problem. Unpacking simple archive which took several minutes before, now takes few seconds.

# Posted By Jacek Jaroczynski | 2/18/08 10:12 AM

Yet another reason why I wish my new computer hadn't come with Vista. Same problem with slow unzip here. Here are the instructions for turning off search in Vista:

1. Click Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click System and Maintenance
4. Click Administrative Tools
5. Double-click Services
6. If asked for permission, click Continue
7. Scroll through the list and find "Windows Search"
8. Right-click it, and click Properties
9. Click Stop
10. Click the dropdown box next to Startup Type
11. Click Disabled
12. Click OK

# Posted By Axel | 4/26/08 7:33 AM

I tried disabling search/index, but this did not solve the problem.

Vista still takes about 30-40seconds to unzip a 50KB file. yes that's right, 50 KILObytes.

this is on a brand new dell dualcore 1.7Ghz with 1GB ram.

# Posted By josh | 4/30/08 11:43 AM

Confirmed. It took 40 minutes to extract 400MB with Vista zip. It took 2 minutes with Winrar. Good one Microsoft.