Windows 7: explorer.exe being unbearable slow

Hello all! I have an issue here which I dunno how to start investigating.. my explorer feels really, really slow time to time. Symptoms are right click menu taking a minute to come up, goes into "not responding mode" when browsing folders, takes a while to start deleting a folder etc etc.

The causes can really be quite a few, so I don't know where to start.. any ideas on what might be causing this, and how I can start investigating the issue?



Regards.

I have this sometimes, the thing I do is to check what process are active and taking up memory and cpu usage, clear up the un-necessary items like steam, msn, google update ect...

Try disabling you firewall, anti-virus ect... all these help improve peformance. I am thinking your computer is struggling with processes.

To check CPU usage open task-manager with ctrl+alt+del or right click the task bar and select task-manager. CPU usage is sitting at the bottom if its over 30% when your system is idle I would say you have too slow of a pc or too many apps open.

If its none of them check you disk http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/guide-to-using-check-disk-in-windows-vista/

I am hoping this helps.

Any disconnected network resources (i.e., a shortcut to a network resource or mapped drive not present?

I would agree with the others in that you could check first what the CPU utilization is when this issue happens. Someone else posted a similar article on a Microsoft site and found out that by disabling the Search Indexing feature did the trick. Here is link on how to disable this feature.

Disable Search Indexing In Windows 7

Well, this is weird.. I've also had an issue with Chrome not performing so well, and noticed that it was "waiting for cache" all the time, causing pages to loads slowly. So I went on and deleted the cache folder, which suddenly greatly affected performance of explorer in a positive way. Go figure :S

Thank you for the link, will check the disk just to be sure. CPU usage seems to be fine, 3% at the moment of typing this. I am really puzzled what caused that spike of bad performance, which went on for about an hour.


Nope, not what I can recall.


Thanks, gonna try that too.

do you have any security softwares set to scan at a specific time or system imaging set on update,etc

I understand about chrome performing like crap as I find it uses too much ram, i use ie9 as it is performing much better for me. Use CCleaner to clear cache on browsers, its quite effective.

Could also be a sign of an impending drive failure. Perhaps you have a hard drive breathing it's last breaths. I'd do a thorough scan of all the drives on the system.

Crap, that could be very true, the drive is about 7 years old.. what method of scanning are you suggesting in order to see if that's the issue?


O, good idea, thanks!

Forget scanning, do a backup first!

Now download a diagnostic cd from hd manufacturer and do a full scan.