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Finding Vista's File Compression tools slow? You're not alone.
As part of a forthcoming review, we had a 1.5GB file to download and unzip. As our Vista test machine is still fairly free of third party tools, we just right clicked on the file and selected 'Extract To..'. After a few minutes it started to look like this was going to take rather longer than expected. For sure, 1.5GB isn't small but the estimate looked crazy. Four hours later it was saying it still had nine hours to go. Clearly something was very wrong.
A quick Google revealed Vista to have serious disk performance issues, something we'd noticed previously ourselves that were fixed by two patches but we already had those and trying a disk benchmark showed the disks themselves were OK so the problem seemed to be the efficiency of the built in compress/extract facilities.
In desperation we stopped it and downloaded WinZip 10 (now Vista compatible) and ten minutes later the file was uncompressed and ready for action. So what's the story?
We asked around and found it's a pretty common complaint. It was noted it had been that way since Windows XP so it's not a new issue with Microsoft's built in ZIP support. Rather oddly, despite the large number of people reporting it, it's by no means universal so if your copy of Vista works fine in this respect, be happy. For the rest of us, it's a little frustrating.
The obvious solution is to use a third party tool and we can confidently recommend both WinZip and WinRar as commercial offerings. We also hear good things about PeaZip which benefits from being free and also understands a number of Linux formats (indeed, it is also available to run under Linux) and 7-zip which isn't yet fully Vista compatible but seems to work well enough and is again, well rated.
The cynic in us can't help but wonder if the abysmal performance in this area is a deliberate ploy by Microsoft to leave the market for third party tools wide open and thus avoid some of the anti-trust flak that so regularly comes their way. But we really don't think even they would be that duplicitous.
Something which seems to have some bearing on the slow speeds, at least under Vista is that if the file originated as a download (and we imagine most do), Vista will mark the file as 'Blocked' i.e. suspicious and this seems to slow down decompression. To fix this, right click on the file and click on Unblock near the bottom, as shown here.
Another website said their research indicated that nested folders seemed to slow it down too - any files with no subfolders usually extract quite quickly. It's worth trying on your won system to see if it helps but in our tests it didn't seem to make a huge difference.
Good News?
The good news is that it seems Microsoft are aware of this particular issue and a fix has been promised in due course.
In the meanwhile, if you are getting frustrated with Vista's slow compression/extraction tools then use one of the third party tools mentioned above as the difference is astounding - as much as 250x quicker in our limited tests.
