Razer Blade 2016 File Explorer Opening Time

Why does it take so long to open File Explorer? Everything else seems fine, but it just takes a bit longer than it should to open it. My 5 year old Aspire S3 (also with an SSD) opens it instantly, yet the Blade takes like a second. I know it's not a huge disaster, but I find myself opening File Explorer quite often, so that gets noticeable.
It's a fresh Win 10 Anniversary install, only 3rd party apps are Chrome, Drive and Spotify.

I know this sounds like whining, but why does a much lower end laptop perform better in an identical scenario?

 

Have you checked your disk usage? That shouldn't be happening.

 

Just did. It was at 0%. Then went up to 2.
CPU usage doesn't go above 20% (usually stays at 1 - 5), memory stays at ~30%.

Here's my CrystalDiskMark, PCMark Storage and PCMark Home results: http://imgur.com/a/BqAH4

 

Huh in that case, I'm not sure what's wrong. That's very weird.

You aren't on like power saver are you?

 

Nope, I'm actually on High Performance. Interestingly enough if I make a shortcut of "My PC" and pin it to taskbar it opens instantly - even tho it's an identical window to the one opened with the File Explorer. I've done a fresh Windows install, and that doesn't change anything.

 

Lol I would just start using that instead then.

 

I was gonna, but that one doesn't have drop down menus for quick access, like Downloads, Documents etc.
Do you have anything like this on your blade?

Edit: just noticed you have the stealth

 

It should not be a hardware issue.
Razer should definitely be faster than your other laptop.

Honestly this will be hard to analyze, did you check the read write speed to see if the ssd is performing well?

And is it only the file explorer? I rarely use it but I guess it could be a win10 optimization issue?

Mine is coming in two days, I could probably run some speed test against yours.

 

I pasted them earlier in my comment, but here are my benchmark results: http://imgur.com/a/BqAH4
It would be really helpful if we could compare our results.

Oh and yes, it seems like it's only happening with File Explorer and only with the opening time. As I noted earlier, if I make a shortcut to My PC it opens instantly from that. But this is a fresh Windows install, identical to that on the Aspire.

 

Ok, I will check with you once I get the machine.
but from the benchmarking, it doesn't look like a ssd issue at all. It must be something else, maybe post your question on a tech support for windows page also.

 

Yeah, SSD speeds seemed just right for the PM951. I sent a question to Razer's support today, will post back once I get the reply.

 

Im literally selling a normal Blade on this forum right now, so no that Blade did not have such isssues.

 

Do you have a network drive mounted or something that is timing out? Mine is instant...Any type of cloud drive services like dropbox/google drive/etc that might be slowing it down?

 

I do have Google Drive installed (and OneDrive disabled), but I have it on my old laptop too, so that's not the issue. Plus it was happening before I installed Google Drive. And no, I don't have a network drive.
What do you mean by something timing out?

 

Could be a device it's looking for. Do you have any phones installed?

 

I can think of three reasons:

1) Windows Explorer is trying to read the contents of a storage device, which needs some time to respond to the request. This can happen if you have any external storage devices connected (USB drive, SD cards, smartphones, etc), network drives that need a moment to connect / authenticate, and cloud-storage mounting programs that need to send and get a request to a remote server so it can confirm the cloud storage is online, accessible, free space remaining, etc.

Disconnect *EVERY* storage device you see in Windows Explorer except your internal drive. Disconnect all peripherals, shut down all network drives and cloud-storage drive mounts. Completely disconnect from any network. And then see if Explorer still takes a long time to load.

2) Are you running any kind of anti-virus? That may be triggering a scan of some sort when you open Explorer.

3) Did you install all drivers? (including Intel Chipset drivers, and Intel RAID storage drivers)? If you're using base Microsoft Windows chipset and storage drivers, it would explain why it's so slow; especially considering that the Skylake platform is newer than Windows 10 (and therefore doesn't have decent out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows drivers), and your Acer Aspire is an older known-quantity that is certainly supported by out-of-the-box Win10 drivers.

 

1) No external storage devices are connected. No cloud services are running. In fact, I even disabled the pre-installed OneDrive.
2) No antivirus, aside from Windows Defender.
3) I didn't install any drivers, but according to this article: http://www.howtogeek.com/233115/the-only-way-to-safely-update-your-hardware-drivers-on-windows/ , Windows 10 is smart enough to install the correct drivers and doing so on your own could do more harm than good. I could try getting the drivers from Razer's site, but do I just install those on top of the ones I have? Or do I remove the current ones thru Device Manager? It sounds like it may cause even more problems.
Even worse, chipset drivers should always be the first driver to be installed, since all it does it identify what devices are in the system (which also means it shouldn't affect performance at all).

I haven't even upgraded nVidia drivers, since the one installed by Windows is a higher version than the latest one on the website (think it's an "exclusive" thing to Windows 10).

Also, It was happening before the clean install too. Right out of the box it would take long to open, and I'd assume Microsoft made sure to install the correct drivers.

 

I have a phone... not sure what you mean by it being installed. I've connected it before and transferred files. But, again, this was happening right out of the box, before I did or installed anything. I got the Blade from Microsoft. Does that matter at all?

 

I guess it could be worth it to show a comparison:

Blade:
https://sendvid.com/ai5qffuq

Acer:
https://sendvid.com/m7f7msdm

My 3 y.o. Sager with weaker hardware in every regard (slower CPU, slower ram, older GPU):
https://sendvid.com/qfvoodh3

It's hard to judge, cuz you can't really see when I click my mouse button, but you can see the "blink" on the Explorer icon every time it's pressed. Both Acer and especially Sager (since it does have decent hardware) consistently open it much faster.

 

Could you maybe host those on a site that doesn't try to push malware and popups at visitors? Youtube perhaps?

 

I didn't have any popups or even ads on there. Not sure what you mean there. Here's a YouTube link to the playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19gIMB4oVCMIFfK0k4fN7Ni27qOysxoG

 

You need to make that public... "The playlist does not exist."

When I click your other links, the page shows, but when I click on the play button to show the video, it opens a new window with a bunch of popups/etc. It's rather annoying.

 

My bad, I really should've looked into it. Here's a link to the public playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKavZhKXJIaBSKTpYoF_rHArAdFbY0lSI

 

I finally fixed the Explorer issue. It turns out it was caused by nVidia Control Panel. All I had to do was open it and uncheck "Add Desktop Context Menu" and "Add Run with Graphics Coprocessor" in the Desktop tab. Now explorer opens up instantly. My guess it I've never experienced this problem before because I've only had AMD GPUs in my previous laptops.

 

Aah... I don't even have Nvidia control panel installed... I'm just using the MS provided drivers for win10...