ccronk wrote on 2024-03-13, 03:36:

I know this is a common "problem" people like to complain about. Apologies if it seems banal to bring it up here. But, amidst copying a whole mess of crap from this laptops paltry 64gb storage space to a usb drive, the transfer rate frequently drops to 0 bytes/s. I had thought this was more on account of the.drive's vendor (Adata). But I've seen it with others also. Actually I only own Adata and Gorilla at the moment.

Is this more about Windows (11)? Any remedy for it?

If this is a Windows 11 capable laptop but has 64GB of storage from factory, then you have an eMMC disk. You're basically running off an SD card and it's a huge performance bottleneck. As soon as something else (for example, Windows) needs to access the disk for something, the transfer stalls. The remedy would be (if your laptop has an NMVe or SATA socket), to get a real SSD.

That said, I'm now a little concerned about what this laptop is. Assuming this is the same one we were talking about before, you mentioned it didn't have an NVMe slot. Not super weird, it's fairly standard practice for cheap laptops to add one low-quality component (e.g. a hard disk) to force an early upgrade. But most laptops with eMMC are even lower spec still - things like 4GB ram and a Pentium Gold/Pentium Silver/Atom/Celeron CPU. If that's the case, I'm honestly not sure I'd spend any money on it. You can pick up a real 12" Thinkpad X280 on eBay in great condition with an i5, 8GB ram, a real SSD and Windows 11 for ... £160? Much better value than trying to upcycle an Atom IdeaPad, sorry to say.

Use it for what it is, and try not to stress over it's limitations. 😀

This is an Asus e410-m. Celeron, 4gb ram,64gb ssd. It has an nvme slot. I've seen these stalls before, regardless.of what LT I was using. It seemed to be most prevalent with Adata drives. I won't swear to it.

Eventually I may upgrade to an nvme. There isn't tons of reason at the moment. It's sort of a backup unit. Or the spare I'll utilize when I don't feel like wrestling w/the 17" Lenovo. Both are low powered but adequate for what I use them for. The damned stalls are annoying though.

Windows 11, the more I use it, has shown to be an annoying buggy dumpster fire of an os. I'm thinking of downgrading to 10.

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-18, 02:06:

Windows 11, the more I use it, has shown to be an annoying buggy dumpster fire of an os. I'm thinking of downgrading to 10.

Honestly? I wouldn't bother. Most of the bad stuff in Windows 11 (except for the stupid context menu) has been backported to Windows 10 now. Bonus, you only have 18 months of Windows 10 left anyway, and the only way to downgrade is a complete re-install. Plus, Windows 10 does not tolerate 4GB ram and eMMC much better than Windows 11 does.

It's a pity. If Microsoft added the CPU Scheduler from Windows 11 (needed for asymmetric multiprocessing) to Windows 10 LTSC 2021 and restored it's 10 year lifecycle: it would be pretty much a perfect* OS. No AI, no adverts, no bloatware - literally nothing more than a stable, reliable OS to build from.

Now would be a great time to explore something like Mint Mate. Relatively efficient, and has support till 2027; plus the next version is likely to be fine on your machine too. Obviously the software installable on a low-resource linux are not the same as Windows 11, but it's an option.

* As far as contemporary Windows is concerned anyway. It's a source of some irritation to me that MacOS has been going downhill since 10.4, Windows since 2000 and most Linux distributions since April 6th 2011 (if you know, you know). General software quality has improved, mostly. But the UX quality has been on a death spiral. Anyway. off-topic.

It sounds hardware related to me, there's nothing inherent about Windows 11 that would cause file copy stalls. I agree 10 would feel faster on the same hardware though, especially LTSC which has minimal bloat. Could also try a dedicated copy tool like RoboCopy (CLI) or TeraCopy (GUI) which may give a better error message and have the ability to retry.

I've seen this occur when a cache or buffer gets filled and the transferring drive has to wait...something like that possibly anyways...sometimes the drive might accept data until the cache fills then the drive will have to spin up...dunno just some things i've seen. Could also have something to do with a realtime virus scan, anything that might momentarily stop the xfer.

4GB? that is your issue right there! Windows 11 absolutely will stutter badly, let alone 10! Soldered on EMMC wears out rendering computer dead. I prefer good notebook that you can replace items on.

The minimum is 16GB for 10 and 11, 8GB do work but too low end.

USB sticks do and will stall. Worse with low quality ones. Best ones I found were home made USB storage is 128GB to 256GB SATA SSD in a 2.5" USB 3.0 enclosure.

Cheers,