Windows explorer GUI lag - much slower than XP

alizarin said:

Explorer in Windows 7 seems to have a lag for any gui operation:

* Selecting different files buy just moving with the arrow keys
* Selecting files
* Dragging a file to drop into a folder

That kind of thing was more or less instantaneous in XP but there's a couple second lag in Windows 7.

Is there something I'm missing to turn off to speed it up again?

I tried turning off Aero, the panes, etc but no change.

I was getting this sort of problem and reported it in this thread

The solution was a complete re-install and i was back to zippy preformance.

For a week.

my Explorer lag has now returned despite having installed nothing new. I also have a new netbook with loads of crapware pre-installed and it runs faster than my high-end desktop. I am wondering whether there is a memory leak somewhere in W7. It is incredibly frustrating.

logicearth said:

You installed nothing? Nothing at all, just a default installation for a whole week? What settings were changed? What tweaks applied? The reason why a reinstall brought it back to zippy performance is because what every was changed or installed was removed.

i installed Office, Firefox, Nvidia drivers + my old docs (12gb of them) during the initial re-installation after which everything ran fine. The problem is that the lag has steadily got worse. Accessing the same folder a week ago was instant. Accessing it now takes at least a second and forces the swirling blue cursor image to appear. My question is what would cause it to get progressively worse over a period of time?

gunjin said:

logicearth said:

You installed nothing? Nothing at all, just a default installation for a whole week? What settings were changed? What tweaks applied? The reason why a reinstall brought it back to zippy performance is because what every was changed or installed was removed.

i installed Office, Firefox, Nvidia drivers + my old docs (12gb of them) during the initial re-installation after which everything ran fine. The problem is that the lag has steadily got worse. Accessing the same folder a week ago was instant. Accessing it now takes at least a second and forces the swirling blue cursor image to appear. My question is what would cause it to get progressively worse over a period of time?

Possibly fragmentation of the HDD and MFT. Could try an offline defrag of the drives. O&O could do this with scheduler upon next reboot.

i have not defragged but would be surprised if it was this. However, thanks for the O&O tip, am dl'ing their their defrag util now.

You'd be surprised. In corporate environment, I've witnessed machines bsod simply because HDD was too fragmented. IT didn't want to listen to me, so I fixed machines myself for them. lol

tried the complete offline defrag and that did not impact the explorer lag unfortunately....

Then it's probably a software you installed along the way.

Problem solved here

Thanks *VERY* much gunjin - that's it - Kaspersky, although to be fair it seems that it's a problem of Microsoft that's breaking Kaspersky. There seems to be a solution on the Kaspersky Forums:

Temporarily disable Self Defense.

Disconnect from the internet, then Settings > Options > disable Self Defense > ok. Use Windows Explorer for a few minutes, then re -enable Self Defense >ok.

If that doesn't do it there are other threads on it.

Several people said that solved it for them.
I tried uninstalling Kaspersky and then reinstalling and rebooting and so far the problem isn't coming back.