Soldato
- Joined
- 11 May 2006
- Posts
- 5,786
I recently discovered this bizarre problem when transferring a large file to a USB external drive (flash or mechanical) under Windows 7 64bit. The transfer goes fine, but I get intermittent pauses in the file transfer, which can clearly be seen from the transfer window in explorer (the write speed, time remaining, etc just halt for a few seconds). The problem is, whilst these pauses happen, various other programs also pause, stuff like Firefox stops responding and I can't open certain programs, like Word, Excel, etc. It doesn't affect every program and component of windows and everything goes back to normal as soon as the file transfer resumes.
As I said, the pauses are intermittent and last for a few seconds. Also, transferring between internal drives is unaffected and it seems to be worst when using a flash disk (the pauses are longer, compared to when using my portable hard disk). Also the problem only seems to occur when the flash disk is formatted in NTFS; formatting to exFat solves the problem. Finally, it seems to manifest itself only with large files, say a few GB in size.
Now, I've been trying to find the source of the problem and eventually narrowed it down to Microsoft Security Essentials. As soon as I disable real-time protection in MSE, the problem goes away, there is no pausing. I'm totally stumped as to why this is happening. I will admit, I don't frequently transfer large files to my external drives and haven't done so in some time, but i'm pretty sure this is a new problem as I've not experienced these pauses before and have been using MSE for a very long time.
Is anyone else experiencing this? Can you reproduce the problem? MSE is fully updated, so is Windows and all my drivers.
As I said, the pauses are intermittent and last for a few seconds. Also, transferring between internal drives is unaffected and it seems to be worst when using a flash disk (the pauses are longer, compared to when using my portable hard disk). Also the problem only seems to occur when the flash disk is formatted in NTFS; formatting to exFat solves the problem. Finally, it seems to manifest itself only with large files, say a few GB in size.
Now, I've been trying to find the source of the problem and eventually narrowed it down to Microsoft Security Essentials. As soon as I disable real-time protection in MSE, the problem goes away, there is no pausing. I'm totally stumped as to why this is happening. I will admit, I don't frequently transfer large files to my external drives and haven't done so in some time, but i'm pretty sure this is a new problem as I've not experienced these pauses before and have been using MSE for a very long time.
Is anyone else experiencing this? Can you reproduce the problem? MSE is fully updated, so is Windows and all my drivers.