Windows 7 Explorer Sluggish? There’s a Fix!
Yet another thing that I’ve been suffering with and finally decided to tackle and straighten out! On my monster laptop, which is running Windows 7 64bit and does almost everything faster than believable, Windows Explorer has been driving me batty. It was slow to display the contents of folders and when I tried to go to a different folder which was far away in the file tree, it was always hopping me back to where I was. My stupid workaround was to close Explorer each time that happened and start over again. Not exactly efficient.
It turns out the my My Document folder had been set to be optimized for Pictures somehow, and that was causing windows to try to generate thumbnails or something every time I looked inside a folder. I can’t tell you how that happened, but switching this
to this
solved the problem.
You make this change by right-clicking on the folder and going to the Customize tab. If you try to change this setting on a folder and can’t find the Customize tab, then you need to navigate directly to the folder rather than through a dynamic link. What this meant in my case was to navigate to C:\Users\Marc D Anderson\Documents rather than going to the same place via Libraries –> Documents –> My Documents.
Hope this helps some other folks out there!
related reading (blog including comments): http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/stopprevent-windows-7-from-deleting-thumbnail-cache/
Andrew:
Unfortunately, what this comes down to is that you need to be WAY too techie to make sure that your machine running Windows 7 is going to be performant on this dimension.
If I put this to the “Mom’ test, it fails miserably. Her machine is just going to suck wind and she’ll assume she needs a new one.
M.
good point however, I just checked my settings and they were NOT set to photos…actually already documents.
Sooooo I believe that you are downloading too many LOLcats photos and win7 automatically set the settings on your folder to photos??
Hah! Oh, no doubt it was my fault in some way. However, if *I* can break it, then so can Mom. And the chance of Mom fixing it is nil.
M.
I think you should remove Andrew Clark’s link to addictivetips.com.
I just checked Norton Site Checker and found that two people found it to be a highly suspicious site.
Andre:
It seems to be an innocuous enough site. I don’t see any reason to remove it, as it has relevant information.
M.
Hey Andre, that addictivetips link was the first I found when snooping around. No need to attach my name to it, I don’t own it. But thanks for the heads up with the norton site checker.