Win7 Explorer - Slower than ever?

What could be causing this? I have a new fast PC (see my profile) and I spend most of my maintenance time watching the damn green bar creep slowly across the top of Windows Explorer. It seems slower than my 8-year-old PC I abandoned for this new one. I have everything on my primary (C) drive indexed but it still can take 2 or 3 minutes to completely refresh to an opened folder, etc.

I have Norton AV and I often run Ad-Watch, Spybot, etc. and some registry cleaners to keep my system trim.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Or is that just the way it is?

NashvilleKit

If it is a recent, as in, very recent install of 7, then it's the Indexing service running.

Norton is pretty not resource-lean, maybe more recent versions are but generally aren't. I'd recommend getting a different AV.

As for your registry cleaner, that maybe doing harm. Could you provide the product details of said cleaner? Many people here don't ever use registry cleaners and use CCleaner. But what I think might be your issue is simply registry fragmentation and not simply registry errors. I think it could be that since if you had 7 installed for a while and performance has degraded.

Hmmm, I don't know, registry fragmentation does cause overall slowness. Hard drive fragmentation obviously is, but I've seen systems where reinstalling almost seems like the best option and when the registry is defragged, it literally runs like Windows has been reinstalled.

karlsnooks said:

coke,
Do you have a Microsoft KB article to back up your

registry fragmentation does cause overall slowness

No, but honestly I doubt Microsoft would say that Windows can get slow after a while of usage.

But what I do have to prove said slowness are faster startups when they took ages, Windows Explorer doesn't stop responding when you try to open many things at once, and a general overall feeling of responsiveness in programs.

I don't have hard proof I can show with startups right now since I personally have defragged my registry a week ago, but if I need to, I'll let Windows get fragged a bit to show some evidence.