Oops! Not so Ultimate now…

While at ZDNet today, and checking out the blog and input from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, I noticed that he has been having a problem on his systems running Vista concerning copying a large number of files.

Mr. Kingsley-Hughes describes the problem as being exacerbated by running Kaspersky Antivirus software, although not specific to that product. It involves copying large numbers of files, 16,400 to be exact, either at one time, or possibly over a period of days where the system does not get rebooted.

The problem manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes the files are simply not copied. Sometimes the ‘out of memory’ error appears, and then other errors are also seen, such as Blue Screens of Death, and unscheduled reboots.

The entry by Adrian also describes Microsoft’s knowledge of this problem for some time, and having a fix for it, but that the fix was not in the SP1 beta released to those people who are ’special’ enough to obtain it.

For those who have experienced the problem, or simply do not want to, here is the hotfix.

Further,

While there are still other file handling problems in Vista, such as selecting large numbers of files (~1,500) cause serious spiking in memory usage (that is not released until reboot), hopefully one by one these issues will be addressed (SP1 maybe … the current beta doesn’t fix these issues).  Maybe then Vista users can feel as confident handling their data as when they were XP users.

Article in full

Clearly Microsoft is showing it either is incapable of doing something we expect of little children - that is, learning from their mistakes, and not repeating them - or it no longer cares to be careful in its practices.

Either way, a message needs to be sent - you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

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[tags] Microsoft, memory errors, kernel me mory errors, file copying operations, BSOD, Kaspersky Antivirus, Vista - the ultimate operating system, irony, hubris [/tags]