What hardware does Windows use when it is "loading" a folder?

wazawak said:

Thanks so much guys! I've finally gotten my windows 7 back in the classic xp style and feel at home on my own computer again. Cheers!

How did you do that? I want classic XP too. I bought a i7 thinking I might see faster folder population. Nope. I just posted in the General area about it yesterday then found this thread.

kari, for me its about being efficient. I like the looks of 7 too but 7 is far from being an efficient os. If I'm not mistaken, the BETA's were snappier than the final. Simple tasks like selecting a Folder or Drive letter in the left pane of explorer prompts lag. It never responds as fast as I want to move.

I click Drive E (an external) to expand the folders and start scrolling down to the bottom of 87 folders and select the 87th folder. What happens? Windows finally catches up and scrolls back up to the top and stops at E again. I then need to rescroll and select the 87th folder again only to wait to resort by Date Modified because while 7 knows I want the folder by Date Modified, it has to perform that task each time I select that folder. Waiting and waiting. Im on a i7 with 4g ram so its not like I am too far away from trying to achieve simple tasks efficiently.

whs said:

hium, I don't think your problem is win7 or your CPU. It is the speed of the disk. You are candidate for a couple of SSDs.

Thanks. Good to hear that. I've often wondered if that might be better for my application. Good thing is that I dont work with many RAW imagines which I know takes longer to populate.

Im still not entirely convinced there isnt a way to have explorer remember thumbs because this was never an issue before with XP. In fact, my right pane of explorer often populated at the blink of an eye on older machines.

I did try the General Items TIP and that does help a bit.

Ravanx said:

So it is a combination of processor, ram and hard disk read speed?
What is the order of their importance? Which is the most important, which is the least?

For accessing folders?
HHD
Memory
Processor
GPU would have little impact.