Craig Boyd’s Compression FLL vs. Windows Vista

I’ve been running Windows Vista Business this week.  A bit sluggish on my machine versus Windows XP, but overall I haven’t had any major issues with it.

Until today.

Today I downloaded a zipped file from the internet. It was 4.1 MB (zipped) and 10.4 MB after extraction.

What killed me was the Extraction Wizard.

The file was downloaded to my ‘personal download’ folder (on my machine, C:UsersKevin RagsdaleDownloads), and when I selected ‘Extract All’ from the pseudo-menu in Explorer, I saw the following screen:

 

Twenty-nine minutes to extract a 10MB file? Oh yeah, that’s how I like spending my afternoons…

Oh well, at least it has the flashy animation in the top right of the form, and (for lack of a better word) the throbbing progress bar. What the heck is it with the progress bar anyway?

After hitting cancel about 80 times, I was finally able to stop the extraction.

Then I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder how long Craig Boyd’s FLL would take?”

Here’s the answer:

 

Now that’s more like it.

To be fair, I should say that Windows was extracting the file to my ‘personal downloads’ folder, while Craig’s FLL was extracting the file to a different partition.

So, I decided to run Craig’s FLL again, this time extracting to the ‘personal downloads’ folder:

 

Freaky, huh? Took almost three times longer. I reckon Vista is doing some of that super-dee-dooper-dee-vista-is-so-secure security stuff. Maybe that is what slowed it down. Dunno.

Maybe it’s my machine. Maybe it’s my install. Maybe I’m just imagining things.

But, still, twenty-six seconds versus twenty-nine minutes?

Craig wins…

Anyone else seeing weird behavior like this in Vista?

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.