Windows 7 has said "about 1 hour remaining" for the past 6 hours! the progress bar moves, but slowly. and yet it still shows about 1 hour remaining. it doesn't show transfer speed. it doesn't show items remaining. just what file it is currently on. each file takes >20 seconds to transfer. how do I fix?
You can't fix this if it is that your drive is slow. What is the drive model? Is it a SSD or HDD? It may also be because of the speed of USB.
Whatever a Dell Inspiron 1525 has as default.
10,000 mp3s
For some reason my brain is telling me that many mp3 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 will take days.
That should only take about 2 minutes with USB 3.0. It might be either your mp3 player that has a slow storage device or the source of the mp3s.
USB 2.0 & Creative Zen Vision: M 30GB
EDIT: Note: transferring from one hard drive to another is not nearly as slow
That's a quite old music player. Check your laptop's Device Manager to make sure that player isn't defaulting to USB 1.0 or 1.1 transfer speeds.
Also, when the player was new (2006) others complained of slow transfer speeds:
Zen Vision M Problem - Painfully slow transfer speeds | AVForums
Post #4 here: Zen Vision:M 60GB Music Transf mentions using Drag and Drop in Windows Explorer rather than Creative's software suite to speed things up.
Quote