Windows Explorer.....

[ryanbrucks]

Hello,

For the last 6 months or so my windows explorer directory browsing has been extremely slow. When I have a folder open and am browsing looking in directories, sometimes it takes up to 5-10 second for a directory to open when I click it. Especially in My Documents. I have thousands of files in there, but I know from experience that it should not be slow loading(and plus, the files are all very organized into directories, each directory doesnt' have many files).

Its been doing this for some time, even on my old computer.

I'm running an ABIT kT7 and Duron600(950mhz o/c), and a RAID 0 of 20gb IBM hdds, for 40 gigs total. The funny thing is that on my old system, a P3 667 and ABIT BE6, the very same thing happened(without RAID). The common links between the systems are, one of the hard drives are the same, same RAM, same Video, Same Sound, same Network Card.

Complete System
ELSA Gladiac
128mb PC133 Mushkin Budget Nanya
20gb IBM DNJA, in RAID
Aureal Vortex2
Dlink 530tx net card.
The common link is also Windows 98se. I can't be sure but maybe my old computer started doing it when I installed SE.

Formatting and reinstalled is of no effect. The most odd part is that the rest of my system is blazing fast in benchmarks. Even in DOS the directory structures are instant, even a dir command is instant in my documents.

In sum up: My windows takes forever to open a new directory and display its contents. It just sits there with an hourglass for a second. The same problem was on an old system. It drives me nuts, since I have to browse to find images alot(textures and pictures and text files).

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Ryan Brucks

 

[frover2000]

Experiment with different videocard driver versions, see if that resolves it.

 

[bacillus]

have you done any hdd benchmarks such as HDTach or Sandra?
may give some insight into your problem.

 

[Shagga]

When you have browsed a folder, moved to another, and if you go back to the first folder is it quicker?

I'm thinking, you have too much stuff running in the background and in the taskbar.....

 

[WDCentral]

I would say defrag if a clean install of Windows didn't fix it...

WDCentral

 

[BFG10K]

How fast do the folders open when you view them through My Computer?
When Windows is sitting there with an hourglass cursor is it accessing the disk?

Defragment and optimise your Hard Disk, and make sure DMA is enabled. Also make sure you aren't running your drive in MS-DOS compatibility mode.

 

[KimVette]

How fast is it if you are not connected to the network, and if you do have network drives, if you disconnect from those drives and then open an explorer window?

If you have a home LAN and you have drives mapped, that's a surefire way to slow down explorer, if the hard drives are asleep on the other computer.

Also, if you have APM enabled locally, if the drives are asleep they will take a few seconds to spin up, which will cause the explorer window to appear to hang momentarily.

Another possibility: If you're opening say, the install directory on the Windows 2000 or Windows NT CDs, or have an MP3 directory with thousands of files 0` it's just going to take a while for the system to figure out what icons to assign to each file, in which case you have to suck up and "deal widdit" :-(

Another item that can slow down this process is some Anti Virus software. McCrappy, er, McAfee is notorious for sucking CPU time. Also, if you have an APC UPS and you're running powerchute, ditch Powerchute. I have found that that application sucks anywhere from 3% to 10% CPU time and doesn't work well anyway.

Or.. Maybe it's *looks at daily excuse list* sunspots </BOFH>

--Kim

 

[GeeWhiz]

Hi.
I have been having the exact same problem for a while now and I just fixed it!
Turns out, many moons ago I used to have the My Documents shotcut on the desktop pointing to a network share that no longer exists.
I went into the registry and deleted every instance of that network path, but that still didn't fix the problem.
I even reinstalled Win98SE on top of the existing installation, but in vain.
I tried to manually point the My Documents shortcut to C:\My Documents. It would take it, but if I went into the properties again, it would have reverted to the old network path.
I have another W98 machine where most of the settings are at default. I did a search and found the relevant entries that were missing on the problematic machine. I exported those keys and imported them on this machine. Problem solved!

Under
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
and under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
added : Personal=C:\My Documents

Under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
and under
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
added : Personal=C:\My Documents

If you want I can email you the files. All you would have to do is import them by right-clicking on them and selecting MERGE.

My email address is rajdawar@iwon.com

This is not the only possible cause for slow Explorer performance, however. The other posts have very valid points in them. This is only a fix if you have been pointing to a network path that you no longer connect to and Windows remembers it.
If you go to Microsoft's web support page and go the Knowledge Base, Just select Windows 98 as your 'Product' and type in 'Windows Explorer slow' as your problem, there will be a bunch of articles that will come up for you to browse through.

Good Luck