Accessing drives in Windows Explorer takes a long time

Xax · Feb 9, 2009

I'm not sure why this is happening, but if I attempt to open a drive in Windows Explorer, it takes a really long time (sometimes several minutes). It takes that long for the progress bar on the address bar to fill up. Does anyone know why this would be?

garysgold · Feb 9, 2009

I have only noticed this the first time or two that I open drives that where used by Vista and the Vista OS partition itself. Places with large numbers of files not created in 7 to start with. Explorer apparently needs to index these files so that it knows what's there to begin with. Hasn't happened here for a while. Yes if the partition (drive) is large it can take a few minutes. I would think mapping a network drive would have a similar process as windows discovers what all is available there.

Gary

Digger · Feb 9, 2009

other than the stated above, depending on your setup and installed programs of course, check the power management making sure you drives dont go to sleep on you so fast or at all.

davehc · Feb 9, 2009

It's a compromise, but you can turn of the Windows search service. I have little use for it , but many have. It speeds up things to normality.

Chappy · Feb 10, 2009

This happens when Explorer has a problem reading the data, and the progress bar shows this by moving slowly.
Most of the time when I see this (Vista or W7), it's usually a CD or DVD and it ends up having a bad block or two (or 7,465 of them..). Is this a removeable storage media by any chance?

I've also seen this happen with HDD partitions and usually when they contain media files, pictures, music, videos.
Check your event viewer next time this happens and report anything that could be related at the time this happened.

darnellto · Feb 10, 2009

Accessing the drives is taking a long time on my system also. I was able to right click on the drive and open a new window to get to my files without having to for the index - temp fix while I troubleshoot.

Jason · Feb 10, 2009

Here are two options that are sure to speed up your drive access, though make sure you have a UPS if you enable advanced performance.

Internal Drive
Right-click Computer, click properties, on the left click Device Manager.

Unfold the "Disk drives" tree (click the +), then right-click your drive, and go to the Policies tab at the top.

Under "Enable write caching on the disk" you will see "Enable advanced performance," tick the checkbox.

External Drive
(Do not forcefully disconnect your external drive if you follow this, always use the "Safely Remove Hardware" option from Windows)

Follow the above steps, but this time (under the Policies tab) tick "Optimize for performance"

--

That should speed some things up.. I don't think that there are any power saving mechanisms that could render slow disk access, I could be wrong though

Also, I've found Explorer to be slow when the wrong type of folder is assumed. For example, my "Installers" folder on my external drive had the assumed folder type of "Music and video," it would try to load meta data from executables, making it a tad slower. Changing the folder type to All Documents sped things up a little bit, and eliminated useless columns.

scaramonga · Feb 10, 2009

Turn off 'windows Search/Indexing' service and you will notice your system flies along

It's a real big system hog that thing, and does nothing but speed up file search. For the extra 10secs it loses in search, I'd rather have more response 24/7. First thing I disable on Win7 or Vista.

FreakyFerret · Apr 11, 2009

Turn off "Show Thumbnails" in Folder Options. "Always Show Icons" is what it's called. Then let me know if it still goes slow for you. I noticed it was really slow and turning that off fixed it a lot. Windows is trying to create the thumbnails.

Boothy99 · Mar 5, 2010

Found an alternative cause - worked for me.

I just found this post, whilst trying to find out why my speedy W7 PC was acting like a pensioner, when I clicked on a folder on my external drive.

I tried out all of the above, with no success, unfortunately.

I have a Seagate Freeagent USB2 - with a few folders of varying content. Most of the folders opened swiftly, irrespective of their size & contents. However, I have a folder to keep mainly movies in. Mainly, being the operative word here.

The strange thing was, if I looked at the folder inside my Network (whilst in Windows Explorer) .... the folder opened and showed all contents instantly! Back to looking at it under ''Computer'' ... and the explorer bar scanned for ages before letting me see things ???? .... strange.

Whilst going through all of the above suggestions, I happened to notice that in the properties of the folder ( Properties / Customize ) .... that the option was set to ''optimize this folder for ... Videos''.

However, I know that there are other items in there that are not videos! I changed the option to ''General items'' and ticked the ''Also apply this template to all subfolders''.

Voila.... problem solved !!

When I went back to the shared folder and checked the properties .... it was set to ''General items''. Wish I'd noticed it before, ..... so thought I'd post it here incase anyone else had the same situation

joema · Apr 19, 2010

Since the first part of this thread contains many speculative remedies which don't fix the most likely cause of this, I created a new thread with a more concise title, problem description and resolution: http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...rer-progress-bar-large-folder.html#post692848

Twrenn · Jul 17, 2011

Boothy99 said:
I just found this post, whilst trying to find out why my speedy W7 PC was acting like a pensioner, when I clicked on a folder on my external drive.

I tried out all of the above, with no success, unfortunately.

I have a Seagate Freeagent USB2 - with a few folders of varying content. Most of the folders opened swiftly, irrespective of their size & contents. However, I have a folder to keep mainly movies in. Mainly, being the operative word here.

The strange thing was, if I looked at the folder inside my Network (whilst in Windows Explorer) .... the folder opened and showed all contents instantly! Back to looking at it under ''Computer'' ... and the explorer bar scanned for ages before letting me see things ???? .... strange.

Whilst going through all of the above suggestions, I happened to notice that in the properties of the folder ( Properties / Customize ) .... that the option was set to ''optimize this folder for ... Videos''.

However, I know that there are other items in there that are not videos! I changed the option to ''General items'' and ticked the ''Also apply this template to all subfolders''.

Voila.... problem solved !!

When I went back to the shared folder and checked the properties .... it was set to ''General items''. Wish I'd noticed it before, ..... so thought I'd post it here incase anyone else had the same situation

This fixed it for me!

TomCollins88 · May 20, 2013

Worked for me too.

TomCollins88 · May 20, 2013

Worked for me too.

jraju · Jun 16, 2015

Voila post by twern, above has also worked for me too. But i had not changed the behaviour in the properties. Some third party program would have done that.

Accessing drives in Windows Explorer takes a long time

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