Real World Computing
Go with the flow
And Vista is definitely punishing. It wants not only to predict how long a copy will take, but also to adapt what resources it offers to the network to make that copy process take as little time as possible. Continuing a long history of attempts to interfere beyond their core area of expertise, Microsoft's engineers have once again stopped treating the network as a closed black box, to be left to hardware vendors' device driver teams, and have got stuck in there to fiddle with what's sent and received over the wire.
By default, they've included IPv6 in Vista networking. I expect by the time the Olympics come to London this will look like a smart move, but until then small businesses are unlikely to find any use for it at all. By default, also, there are agents in the Networks control panel for looking at what's coming up and down the wire, and vendor-supplied Friendly Add-Ons get into the mix, too. Put this lot together with some kit that has a slightly eccentric approach to auto-negotiation (let's say it made a promise to operate in full-duplex mode in the signalling phase, which later, in the traffic phase, it forgot or can't live up to), and Vista starts to believe it can perform all kinds of fancy tricks on a line with no ability to support them.
As with the simpler, older forms of network tuning (see How slow can you go?, below), it can take a few turns around the configure-reboot-recopy cycle to hit the right combination of settings for minimum pain. Even when you've done the most basic starting configuration by locking all your servers and workstations to 100Mb, IPv4, half duplex, you may still have to swap your 15-year-old £3,500 network switch for a new £299 one to get Vista to play ball. Take a look at the settings dialogs I've included here, taken from my much-travelled, much-connected ThinkPad, and see if you can get close to them, then see what that does to your network performance. Start the process by picking a quiet time of day, and power off your network switch before you start investigating.
