Vista Bug - sucking up bandwidth
We have a test machine here running Windows Vista. Anybody who knows me will tell you that I personally am a huge fan of Microsoft stuff. It’s probably just because I’ve been using Windows for so long… I don’t know, I’m just not ready to go down the Mac road.
This morning, however, our Vista machine was retrieving some updates - no problem, that’s what it’s supposed to do, right? Apparently, however, the default setting for downloading updates (all 2GB!) was to utilize all available bandwidth.
What was the result? Pretty predictably the internet slowed to a crawl and eventually everything was timing out for all of our employees over here. When we finally figured out who the bandwidth hog was (an unattended test machine) I was shocked.
I am guessing that this is a bug - surely Microsoft doesn’t mean to suck all available bandwidth for an update. As Mark said, though, this is why businesses are waiting to adopt the new OS… but I’ll definitely give Vista a shot sometime soon.
I’m hoping that if everybody keeps leaving the PC in search of stability and a more intuitive interface then I may be one of the last Windows guy’s standing… and Microsoft will be forced to give me one of those awesome Ferrari laptops. Hey, I gotta have a dream.
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I have been using Vista for a while now without noticing this. Check out my program for seeing what process is actually using this bandwidth
Comment by james — March 26, 2007 @ 12:05 pm
As much as I’d love an opportunity to bash Vista, I wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blame wagon here.
Almost any program that downloads will use all the bandwidth available to it. Download a file with IE or FF or download updates to any program out there - they will all use up all the bandwidth they can.
That’s not to say Vista didn’t cause the crash, but if it did I would think it would be due to something else - like opening up too many TCP connections or something (not likely given XP’s TCP connection limit which I assume is in Vista as well). Even more likely is that it was just a combination of a huge file download, poor QoS rules, a crappy modem/router, etc.
It’s also possible it was getting a poor connection or something and the router got flooded when there is no timeout on reconnect attempts.
Weird that our roles have switched. Usually I’m the Vista basher.
I would like to see if anyone else has had these problems, though.
Comment by Sam — March 26, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
make a comment about a Microsoft product on your blog? I am not sure I want to go down that road….
Comment by Jon S — March 26, 2007 @ 9:58 pm
Well let me begin by saying that Windows Vista is a HUGE let down in my opinion and i’m sure for 90% of it’s users. My girlfriend and cousin just recently bought computers exceeding the requirements for the OS to work properly by a significant amount and the damn thing slows both systems down significantly in comparison to XP. Loading times have increased and just browsing around has also suffered in decreased speeds. I am still awaiting my copy over the mail now, however, after fiddling around my girlfriend’s and cousin’s computer I am fairly certain that I will not upgrade for another year. I am just sad for the people that went out of their way to purchase this junk.
Comment by secure email — March 30, 2007 @ 3:16 am
Hello!
I faced the same problem in my XP Prof. Ed. SP2, maybe this might help:
http://www.mobile-pedia.com/?q=Software/WinXPBandwidth
Comment by ehtisham — April 24, 2007 @ 9:51 am
I’ve experienced the same thing kicking my kids off World of Warcraft by monopolizing all the bandwidth available. Come on Microsoft fix this bug and cause it to download first.
Comment by Rich — April 29, 2008 @ 6:25 pm