Explorer SLOW on large folders

I'm finding Explorer to be extremely slow on large folders (containing 2,000+ files for example) Much slower than Vista and insanely slower than XP.

It seems to REALLY be tryng hard to peek at every file and gleen info from them every time you open the folder instead of just populating the list as fast as posible. When doing work on your files, the last thing you want is to have to wait 15 seconds for the folder to open when all you want to do is drag a file into it and close it.

I have already set all the folders to the standard details view / general with nothing but the standard name/date/type/size columns which on XP are INSANELY fast to populate. Probably not indexing... previous versions maybe? Or new "auto" functionality built in?

Anyone know of anyway of completely turning off the helpfulness that's been added to explorer for good? I don't need to know I have 2,000 files listed as "unspecified" if it's going to take 15 seconds to figure that out :)

Hmmm, may have a fix for this. By default folders come up set to "Optimize this folder for: General" but swithcing folders with a lot of files over to "Documents" seems to stop Explorer from trying to figure out anything about the files that is not already in the file tables.

Nothing like asking about a problem to make you REALLy try to figure it out :/

Many thanks for this! It certainly solved the problem here. Windows 7 was 'optimising' my TV recordings folder as a 'video' folder. Listing the folder contents was like treacle.

I used your advice and reset the 'optimisation' to 'General', and now everything is quick and smooth when listing folder contents.

We really need WinFS, relational db's for the win!

Kari said:

Had the same problem, your solution seems to work. I´d rep you but for reasons unknown to me your posts have no rep-button.

I may need to hand out a couple mor reps to get any more maybe?

Or maybe I got a complaint!

[Edit] Hmm this new one has a button, Maybe the button expires after a while...