Why are my folder views building so dern slow??

joyojoy

Not all there...
Joined
10 Mar 2005
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250
I'm running Windows XP (home) on a new, custom-built computer with with 1 GIG of RAM, 40GIG hard drive, Radeon 9600 Graphics board, Semipron (sp?) processor and an MSI motherboard.

A lot of times when I go to view a folder that has a lot of items in it, it takes FOREVER for the window to build all of the icons for each and every single item in the folder, even when I have it in "list" view. It's especially slow when I am trying to attach a file from MS Outlook: it makes me wait until it builds all of the icons... including the ones that aren't visible in the window yet. Sometimes it'll bounce the window all the way to the end of the directory and make me wait there. It won't even allow me to click on a file or enter a file name until it's done building everything.

Yesterday I just about went crazy trying to view the files on my camera's smart card. It was taking almost 2 minutes to build the thumbnails of the 40 or so pictures I had on the card.

Is it possible that this problem is related to my monitor? I have an LG 19" flat screen and I have the view set to the highest resolution possible (if I go to lower resolutions, text appears out-of-focus).
 
Open windows explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View.

Untick 'do not cache thumbnails'.

See how that goes.
 
Hipster Doofus said:
Open windows explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View.

Untick 'do not cache thumbnails'.

See how that goes.

Thanks...I checked, and that was already deselected. It's driving me nuts! I was just trying to view some photos that I just shot today: Opening the folder from my flash drive took FOREVER, and then when I FINALLY got them copied to a folder in "My Pictures," it still took about a minute for it to build all of the thumbnails in that folder.:eek:
 
how much nenory?

try this;

open up your registry and make your way here:-
HKEY_LOCAL_
MACHINE / Software / Microsoft / Windows /currentversion / Explorer
in the right side, right-click a blank area and choose "New" "String Value" and call it
Max Cached Icons
Double-click this new Key and type the value
8192

off to bed, I'll see if it worked tomorrro
 
Do you have file compression enabled? Have you defragmented your drive lately? Disk fragmentation could cause your file access, computer startup, and shutdown to be slow.
 
Hipster Doofus said:
Open windows explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View.

Untick 'do not cache thumbnails'.

See how that goes.

In my experience UNCHECKING this option makes the listing of directories slower rather than faster. Leave it on for fast browsing of directories.
 
1badtech said:
Do you have file compression enabled? Have you defragmented your drive lately? Disk fragmentation could cause your file access, computer startup, and shutdown to be slow.

I do have an NTFS drive, but the compression isn't enababled.
I checked also did a scan, and was informed that it didn't need to be defrag'ed either.

Also tried enabling and disabling the cache: enabling made it worse, but either way, it's still slower than snot on an icicle.


Perris: I have 1GB of RAM, and two 40GB hds. The main C drive still has about 17GB of space available (I store most of my files on the spare 40). I'm going to try your registry fix when I get home from work. I'm also going to just do a general scan for errors. Probably wouldn't hurt to do another virus scan, too...
 
:mad: I've had it! I'm taking it back to the guy who built it for me!
Last night I was trying to organize my photos to post some on my photobucket account. Some folders only had maybe 10-20 pix in them, some had maybe 50. It was taking about 3-5 minutes for the &#@*%!! computer to build the windows every stinkin' time I tried to open them. I really need to use thumbnail view so I can see the pictures, but it shouldn't be taking this long to build the thumbnail views. The thumbnails built a little faster if I tried to open them directly from Photoshop, using the "open" command, but even those were slow. Several times it froze up Photoshop. I was even getting "Not responding" messages when I was just opening the windows on my desktop.

Oh, and another wierd thing: when I first open it in thumbnail, it sort of builds a small "tile view" of each photo centered in a frame the size of the thumbnail view.

Wierder yet, when I go to a new folder, if it's just in list view, instead of the generic Photoshop icons by each name, it creates a tiny tile view of the last photo in the last folder I just open.

Is it possible that the problem resides in the interface for my LG 19" flat screen?

Any other suggestions?...

(By the way: Thanks, Perris, for the suggestions about adjusting my registry, but I'm very nervous about messing with that kind of stuff.)
 
Try getting the Free irfanview program, it has a nice customizable thumbnail viewer and it has many graphic options.
 
wingman411 said:
Try getting the Free irfanview program, it has a nice customizable thumbnail viewer and it has many graphic options.
OOOH! Looks like a cool program. I'll give it a try! Thanx!
 
I installed Kaspersky antivirus 3 weeks ago and from the first day I noticed this same problem. The files I notice this problem in have photo's or driver updates in them (larger files) it seems Kaspersky wants to scan every file as I open it.

I have disabled Kaspersky and the files open close to as fast as they did before the Kaspersky install.

I haven't had much time to see if Kaspersky can be set to not do this yet but I'm going to look around later then see how that goes.

So if your running any antivirus check to see if it's scanning every folder as it's opened. Disable the antivirus for a little while see if the files open and generate any faster.

I have 1.5G of memory thats fine. My problem started at the install of Kaspersky.
 
bush dogg said:
So if your running any antivirus check to see if it's scanning every folder as it's opened. Disable the antivirus for a little while see if the files open and generate any faster.

I have 1.5G of memory thats fine. My problem started at the install of Kaspersky.
Hmmm... I'm running MacAfee... Sounds like a good suggestion: I'll give that a try. Thanx!!:nervous:
 

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