copy speed

I'm using Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP Pavilion a1720n which I've had since 4/07.

When I copy files (especially large files), I find that the rate of the copy starts high (often several Mb/sec) but by the time the copy is finished the rate has dropped to 200-300 Kb/sec. Of course, as the rate drops, the time to complete the copy increases. Can anyone tell me why the rate drops, or more to the point what I can do about it?

This probably ought to go into the "networking" forum.

It depends on the type of copy which you're doing. If it's a LAN-based Explorer (SMB) file copy between two Windows machines, that is indeed a problem and you should test whether the same thing happens when both computers are booted to [safe mode + net].

Otherwise, if you're talking about downloading something from the internet, it's more likely a cosmetic side-effect of the way that the app and/or your NIC driver report speed statistics. The first few chunks of data that come down are "bunched up" during processing so it looks like they arrived together very quickly and the corresponding rate calculation is unrealistically fast. Over time, the real rate of transfer becomes more apparent and the estimate drops to hundreds of kilobytes per second, which is entirely satisfactory for most home internet links. In fact, there's no theoretical way you're getting "several Mb/sec" (small 'b' in that acronym usually denotes megabits, not megaBytes [MB]), unless you've got a multi-megabit link to your ISP.