Why is Windows Explorer slowing down?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #64, I look at several factors that could be making Windows
Explorer load slowly.

Slow Windows Explorer

There are a couple of different of possibilities here that come to mind
right off the bat.

Surface defect

One is that even though CHKDSK reported that the drive is clean, it is
possible that there is a surface defect on the drive that is causing the drive
to read more slowly.

In other words, the operating system as it tries to read a marginal sector
(or a number of marginal sectors of data) has to try again and again and again
to finally read the data. That of course adds up to slowness when you see
it.

The thing I would do first would be to run CHKDSK /R. /R does a surface scan
and presumably will detect any bad sectors and mark them as being no longer
available for use. It will actually move the data around as well. So, if things
are working for you now, if CHKDSK /R finds anything, then you should actually
have no data loss.

Hard disk repair

If it doesn’t and it still feels like a hard disk problem, I also often
recommend SpinRite.

SpinRite does what I call a “low-level format” without losing any data. What
that boils down to is it will go out and read and rewrite
every sector on your hard drive, making sure that it can. If for whatever
reason it has trouble reading the data, it will do everything in its power to
recover that data from a sector and then either write it in that same place (a
fresh copy) or write it somewhere else on the disk. And as the CHKDSK did,
mark the sector that it had problems with as bad.

Unfortunately, SpinRite isn’t free. I believe it’s like $95. That obviously
starts to compete with the cost of a new hard drive… though you might
actually start looking at the cost of your time to do the replacement of a hard
drive or something like that.

Overloaded directories

The other couple of things that aren’t quite as dramatic, but still could
impact the performance and the speed at which Windows Explorer might display a
directory listing are simply the number of files.

You haven’t indicated how many files there are, but it takes longer to show
more files.

If files are accumulating (even if hidden files are there), then Windows
Explorer has to do more work to enumerate the list of files that it’s about to
display and to present things like the list and the appropriately sized
scroll bars.

Now, obviously, one thing you can do is see if there are a bunch of
files… move some somewhere else. In other words, create sub-folders and
organize your data a bit so not everything is in a single folder.

How much is “big”?

When I talk about “large numbers of files,” what do I mean?

Easily a thousand files, I think, could cause this kind of an issue.

Potentially (depending on your system) as little as a hundred files in that
folder could have a negative impact on performance.

It’s one of those things that does grow over time, as you add more and more
files to the folder. So check out the number of files that you’ve got in there.
See if you don’t want to reorganize things a little bit – if there are
a large number of files.

Detail view

Finally, the other thing that you haven’t mentioned is which
View you are using.

Interestingly enough, if you are using something like an Icon view or a
Thumbnail view, Windows Explorer has to do a lot more work for every file
that it’s going to display. It actually has to open the file, read the icon out
of it, or produce a thumbnail from it.

Especially… if the thumbnail cache has been turned off, that can take a
fair amount of time and is again one of those things that would increase as
the number of files increase in that folder.

The alternative (and to be honest, the way that I run completely; only) is
to select the View menu and select
Details. I only look at file details.

You won’t get a pretty picture. You won’t get an icon. You’ll get the file
name, its size, its date, a couple of other things, but that will be very
quick – because Windows Explorer then doesn’t have to go out and grab all those
icons, or create all those thumbnails, or what have you.

So those are the kinds of things I would point you at:

• Potential hard disk problems

• The number of files you have in that folder

• The view setting that you are using within Windows Explorer

The last two obviously are really quick to check so I’d suggest you do those
first and then I’d start looking at potential hard disk issues.