About general malaise some specific behaviors

Machine and OS: Sager NP8760 Laptop - Win 7 home

I'm seeing a specific phenomena that I suspect may point to some specific kind of problem.

I have a directory in home where I keep a bunch of shortcuts to various tools. I then put this directory on the task bar. I guess like another start menu, only one of my creation and organization. But it also means its a directory that gets open a lot.

It gives me a way I can open the hierarchy by clicking a spot on the task bar and quickly find shortcuts to most of my oft used applications.

I started noticing a phenomena when opening that hierarchy, ditto at the regular start menu and just regular directories too, where the top level opens right up but does not populate for quite a noticeable period. from 10 to 30 seconds. And the trend seem to be to longer pauses. It doesn't usually go as long as 30 but has a few times.

I can't imagine that opening a directory containing only 30-50 files could be taxing in any way.

So getting to the point here; I wonder if that sloth in displaying the contents of a directory is symptomatic of something that has a known cure. Or, that is, I wonder if this pausing is pointing to some kind of problem that has a cure.

It seems to be coming on at a time where I've had the OS in operation daily for several yrs, have installed uninstalled many things and in general run things thru the grease. Maybe there would be lots of cruft having built up in places like the registry that could be behind this.

Or maybe that whole kind of sentiment online is just something to help companies sell computers or more likely sell questionable cleaners and the like.

Before I try something like reverting to 'out of the box' state by using the onboard reverting tools, I'm
hoping someone here might recognize the phenomena.

I realize, of course, I could expect something like that when a particularly heavy load was being imposed on the CPU and probably a few times that has been the case, but often it seems to occur when nothing is going on. In fact it seems to be happening more often, also seems that it often occurs on the first instance of opening or when there has been a good bit of time elapse between openings. On that point I'm not really sure....but it does seem to be the case.

What is this phenomena trying to tell me?

andrew129260 said:

When opening the folder on the taskbar...

Is it opening it over the network?

No, strictly on the localhost

External hard drive maybe?

No, internal and the same hard drive the OS is on

If its local disk,
What security software do you use?

None

If it were security related, it would happen every time all thru the filesystem right?

The files in the subject directory are files the OS knows about. Only rarely do I change, add, subtract links there.

As mentioned in OP, the phenomena does not always occur. The time it is least likely to occur is immediately after it has just occured.

Say I've just started up the OS and let things get settled down. Go to my taskbar directory of links, click the taskbar marker... the directory opens but displays a blank field. Just a white area instead of a list of links. I wait and finally it fills in.

Ok, get done there... and a few minutes later I try it again. This time its almost guaranteed to open right up and be populated immediately.

Startup prioritizes which functions will enable first. For example, it seems Windows wants to get you online right away, so processes related to that occur first. Even after your desktop is populated and the network is engaged, the processor is still churning away on the queue of "lesser" processes - all of which soaks up RAM and cycles. So it may look like startup is all complete, but if you were to open task manager, you would see a cascade of functions still starting up.
After you have opened your menu folder, it is still retained in memory cache, and so opens up promptly.

Try adding more RAM, or if you have a decent sized thumbdrive configure it for Readyboost, and see if that speeds things up.