Vista File Transfer Slow, Google Can't Find a Fix

[DigitalSympathies]

Hey all. It's me again. -lighting flashes outside window as screechy organ note plays-

I've noticed that, on my Vista (x32) machine, file transfers (copy, paste) from one drive to another are INSANELY slow compared to my W7 (x64) or XP (x32) machines . . . so slow that sometimes it gives me a random 6-digit number for the time remaining. I have 3 GB DDR2 RAM. Acer Aspire M5620 desktop, half a decade old, runs like a beast for everything else.

Is there any way to speed things up?

[whiterider]

This is more likely to be due to the type of drives you're using than RAM or OS. Do you know the model numbers of your drives? There are various ways to find out, such as using EVEREST. Most likely you have a drive with slow read/write speeds.

[ellacharmed]

And...I believe Vista's indexing is worse than Windows 7. The Index/Search thing is the first thing I turn off after disabling Automatic Updates.

Half a decade old? How full and fragmented is the harddisk?

[DigitalSympathies]

whiterider - Both drives are brand new, I don't know the model numbers but they're Western Digital Caviars, straight out of the box. Two 1 TB internal SATA drives, C and D respectively. Formatted NTFS. Both are around equally full with give or take 60-ish GB left on each, because I'm trying to transfer my old C drive's contents onto the new one.

ella - Vista is terrible with indexing, I know that much from experience. I nuke Windows Update with Task Manager every time. :) The computer is regularly updated with very recent parts as I run my own shop out of my house (minus RAM, but I'm getting an upgrade within the week as my old 16 GB set was faulty), but the actual OS and the contents of the harddrives date back to five years ago as I'm probably the only person on earth who prefers Vista over 7. 7 . . . just doesn't like my computing style. The harddrive is regularly defragged with Disk Defrag (the program).