Windows Explorer Poor Performance: multiple issues with drives

Ocman76 · 25 Oct 2015

Recently after some changes to my PC windows explorer has become very slow at performing specific tasks:

1. Trying to view the properties of folders takes anywhere from 5-8 seconds when it used to take less than one.

2. When I open folders that have lots of images in them, it takes 3-6 seconds for windows to load the previews of the images.

3. This Windows Live Mail issue that I created a separate thread about.

My PC has a SSD for the OS and a HDD for storage. It doesn't matter which of these drives I am accessing with windows explorer, they both have the above problems.

As for the recent changes to my PC:
I recently was screwing around with my drive partitions and made a really stupid mistake. I accidentally created a new volume which took up my whole secondary HDD (not my OS drive). Thankfully some quick google searching got me a free software that recovered my partitions and after a quick reboot my PC appeared to be working fine again.

But now I have all these weird problems and have no idea how to fix them.
Short of a clean windows 10 install, does anybody have any suggestions?

Night Hawk · 25 Oct 2015

Have you looked at the drive space lately on the SSD or OS drive? Often once the "C" drive fills up things will tend to slow down. Previously with 7 I ended up seeing a clean install following the restoration of a full system image shortly before that back in May 2013. The clean install came about a month later when WE was still "Not responding" and finally I simply made new shortcuts to the "explorer.exe" system file in the Windows directory itself to see a few new shortcut and pinned items from.

The most common slow downs with access times however are seen when something is writing to a folder or drive in the background such as to the paging file if you have an app running or the maintainence schedule has kicked in automatically for seeing the drive defragmented without your notice being run by Windows in the background. Your av program may be running a silent scan to sweep for any bugs.. Don't think for a moment this is a 10 issue only! it goes all the way back ot 9x in fact.

Ocman76 · 25 Oct 2015

Hello Night Hawk, thank you for your response.

My SSD and HDD have a fair amount of space on them currently:

Windows Explorer Poor Performance: multiple issues with drives-untitled.png

I am getting this problem on a consistent basis, any time. This has been going on for over a week, so an automatic defragmentation or virus scan is not the culprit.

My disk usage also is sitting at 0% when this problem occurs, I just confirmed with task manager.

I really don't want to do a clean OS reinstall, but I haven't found any other options yet :/

pokeefe0001 · 25 Oct 2015

Ocman76 said:

Recently after some changes to my PC windows explorer has become very slow at performing specific tasks:

1. Trying to view the properties of folders takes anywhere from 5-8 seconds when it used to take less than one.

2. When I open folders that have lots of images in them, it takes 3-6 seconds for windows to load the previews of the images.

The problem I've had is probably a different one, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

I, too, experienced extreme sluggishness, but it was temporary. It lasted maybe 10-15 minutes and then cleared up. This was after the system had been running fine for days. My malware detection and protection products (Kaspersky Internet Security 2015, and Malwarebytes (the free version) found nothing. I have no idea what caused this, and I've seen no reports of similar problems, but something sure slowed my Win10 box down for a while.

No suggestions for the OP, but I feel (have felt) your pain. I hope your problem has cleared up by now.

Night Hawk · 25 Oct 2015

You will notice that C is filling up fast so keep a close watch there since SSDs are typically much smaller in size. I can't even or won't consider one here until the 1tb models don't cost the same amount I could use to put a new case together with!

Even when the drives are not being accessed another thought that comes to mind is what may be running in the background at the same you are having the File Explorer(Previously Windows Explorer) type problems. While my 2013 clean install was overdue anyways back then I never was able to isolate the exact reason why WE windows would suddenly bind up.

Likewise 10 has been seeing an usual oddity of a similar nature only this is where nothing on the main taskbar does anything when clicked on until signing out and then back in again following a full restart of the system at times and other times when only having signed out due to a setting change.

I suspect the two different types of problems are Windows related in either case as well as the 10-15 minute time frame pokefe0001 has been encountering as well. When previously running into this back in 2013 the clean install only helped a little bit but wasn't any lasting solution as you would think it would be. Keep track of the Task Manager and just what processes are running at the time to get an idea of what may be playing tag with Explorer windows.

lx07 · 26 Oct 2015

Explorer issues like this are often caused by shell extensions. Try disabling all the non-Microsoft ones with shexview as described here.

Night Hawk · 26 Oct 2015

You won't find that many that are not MS! Here there were 3 for Acronis TI, a few for the av software, and a few singles for other small apps lingering around.

"NirSoft... NirSoft... NirSoft... and... " when going to download this for a fast look just now I found I couldn't save it for any of the usual folders since it was already downloaded for 7 and copied over to 10 as well as unpacked. I just never got around to creating a shortcut. I knew it looked familiar however. That place is loaded up with utility apps for different categories but are mostly Legacy-XP types.

Ocman76 · 26 Oct 2015

halasz said:

Explorer issues like this are often caused by shell extensions. Try disabling all the non-Microsoft ones with shexview as described here.

I disabled all non-Microsoft shell extensions, no change in my issues.

PJLLB · 26 Oct 2015

Maybe the search index needs to be rebuilt after you messed with the partitions.

fdegrove · 26 Oct 2015

Hi,

I disabled all non-Microsoft shell extensions, no change in my issues.

As the last poster suggested, it may be "Search" (AKA Crawl (how apt !) ) related.

I had issues like this too which disappeared once the indices were fully rebuild. Eventviewer logs this.
Once that's sorted the problem seems to go away somewhat but I do notice exporer being hesistant sometimes to go from one item to an other in a dropdown menu (as the one used for copying etc).
Either way, this seems to be an intermittent problem. The hardest ones to pin down really.

You could of course disable the search service entirely. Personally I don't need this as I tend to remember were all the files go most of the time. YMMV.

Cheers,