Why does my folder(s) take so long to load…

Hoping you guys can help me with this issue I've been having for a while now - it's the reason I jumped early on "updating" to RS4, which hasn't helped

As the title says, certain folders (Downloads being one of the worst) will taking a long time to load their contents. I double click and then sit waiting for ~5 sec. looking at a "working on it" message before the contents ever show up.
My Google searches have led me to try the usual fixes (changing folder optimization to "General", clear the Quick Access db) and nothing has worked so far - on the Quick Access front, I don't even have anything pinned to QA since I never use it.
I've followed Phoenix's clean install guide so Defender (and the rest of the MS nannyware) should be a non-issue. Tried disabling search indexing, no joy.
I'm currently using Avast Free AV with everything disabled (aside for the File Shield), but my previous install was using Panda free with the same problems

I'm not ever sure where to look next so I hope you guys can offer some advice

 

Sounds like a combination of a bloated or low-powered machine, your AV, slow ish disk access/speeds (slow or full drives can act like this, especially with tons of files in a single folder), possible driver issues or conflicts.

But typically, context menu additions are an issue alongside Intel integrated GPU driver related options.

Need more specs on your machine and current windows installation to really take this further.

What CPU, storage disks, make/model, GPU(s), how many processes and threads do you have on a fresh boot, when is the last time you did a clean install, have you tried temporarily uninstalling your AV completely, etc.

I will update this post with some helpful links soon if I can find them.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-details-pics-of-internals-optimizing.811380/

Check out:

Eb2a
Eb2b
Ea4
Dd5
Dd6

The right click lag and explorer opening time lag are somewhat related, they were annoying me on my machine. Try disabling the Intel integrated graphics context menus first and see if it improves at all. Iirc mine improved by doing that, but not 100%... I did some other tweaks and mods that helped further. Disabling unnecessary Windows services can help too.

Have you tried using LatencyMon to determine if you have any craptastic drivers introducing unnecessary delays and lag?

 

I wouldn't think that the issue would be related to slow hardware (Acer NitroBE, 2.something Ghz 6700. 8GB RAM.). Even though the HDD is only 5400RPM ((Seagate), I doubt that'd be the problem since I've only really noticed the slow down in the past few months. The HDD was only a quarter to third full and the slow folders typically wouldn't have any more than a dozen or so files (eg. an albums worth of FLACs, plus artwork, liner notes).
I don't think the drive itself is failing - I haven't had any other issues with it, but I also haven't ran any tests.
I was wondering about all the piled on bloat the MS keeps adding to its updates (auto-maintenance, etc) but I've tried to disable as much as possible.
My last clean install was a week or so ago, but since RS4 is such a clusterf*** right now, I'm trying out some different versions to see if they're any better. This time around I also wiped and formatted the HDD just to be safe (BTW, my OS lives on a SSD, but because its only 128GB I keep Docs/Pics/Vids/Downloads folders on the HD)

 

Ok so the 5400 rpm drive it's going to be a major pain point, especially with your OS on SSD and an antivirus program constantly scanning your folders as you try to access them and such.

I would start by uninstalling your AV completely to eliminate that as a factor while troubleshooting this.

Next I would run some disk diagnostics on your HDD to get an idea of where in its lifespan it is. It sounds like it could possibly be starting to fail but diagnostics and its age
Would tell you more on that.

2GHz CPU and 8GB RAM can be borderline if your machine is bloated or not very lean (especially with AV). What's your RAM usage and process/thread count on a clean boot? How many auto-start programs do you have? Also what drive is your page file set to use?

Did you try disabling the Intel contact menu entries that are known to create lag in the O/S?

 

Disable System protection aka System restore permanently and see if it helps.
System restore takes huge IO and slows down everything. After disabling it, everything is fine!

 

That makes a lot of sense too! I never use system restore and always disable it.

 

The drive response time has been good (or at least what I'd expect) until recently. I'll throw Seatools (or if you have any other diagnostic tool to recommend) at it sometime in the next day or two and give it a full checkup.

Same issue has occurred with two different AV (Panda previously, Avast currently)

My god man! I don't have nearly enough fingers and toes to count how many processes are running under Win 10 . I do follow Phoenix's clean install guide so it should hopefully be the minimum. Auto-start programs are maybe 5-6. Pagefile is on the SSD.
(For kicks, I'm currently trying out LTSB so most of the stats I'm giving are based off memory of the old bloated Home install)

Like Phoenix, I've never had system restore do anything useful so it's never been enabled

 

Yeah throw in Seatools or Victoria HDD or Hard disk Sentinel to check your disk health.

 

Here is my machine at mostly idle and not even on a fresh boot for your reference. On a clean fresh boot when I am about to game (which means I close a few extra things) I idle at like 1-2% CPU and less than 130 processes.

 

I think I cut down some process down to 80 or 90. So on idle my CPU consumes 0.5W acc. to TS.

 

Before we can start anywhere we need some specs.

1. What is your harware specs...cpu, gpu, ram
2. What O/S are you using and what bit version 64 or 32?
3. HDD specs and what kinda SSD and how are they assigned and did you plug them into the right Sata ports to max. access time?

My only guess why the slow down is the A/V is too aggressive or setup to aggressive to scan every time. I have Windows 10 pro 1803/Defender and have no bottle necks in HDD access and I have 14 of them to say at 5400rpm each.

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700HQ @2.6Ghz
GPU: GTX960m @ 4gb gddr5 (+ Intel 530)
OS: At the time - Win 10 Home x64, latest 1803 build
HDD: Seagate 1TB @ 5400RPM. SSD: Transcend TS128GMTS800 M2 (plugged into the only places the fit and assigned automatically, I guess - I never had to do anything, they were just there )

I haven't played around much with the AV settings, pretty much left them at default other than disabling the cloud scanning parts.

I ran some tests on the HDD with Seatools (couldn't get any of the other programs to work) and it seems to think everything is good.

Honestly, I think troubleshooting is probably going to be pointless ATM since by the time you guys replied I had given up and started trialling different builds. So far everything is running good on LTSB (62 processes BTW)
If I do feel the need to have the bloat back (I think I still have a Macrium image somewhere on my portable HD) I might start digging back into this more

Thanks for your help anyways.
Cheers

 

Disable any A/V and see what happens to access time if anything changes. And worse cause total uninstall of the A/V and installing Defender and see if anything changes from previous bottle necks you were having.

 

I'll recommend NO AV at all for testing if AV is actual cause.

 

Tried just disabling Avast for now - just too lazy to uninstall - and there didn't seem to be much of a difference. That being said, so far the access time is much faster than previously. That could'd be due to the LTSB install I'm trying out, or maybe the fact I actually cleared and formatted the HDD before I installed - something I've never bothered with before, I'd usually just make it offline. Or it could just be ideal cosmic alignment…

One thing I have noticed is that the access time seems to be faster if I go "User folder -> Downloads" as opposed to "This PC -> D: -> Downloads". Worse case scenario this time around the wait is ~1sec. Nowhere near as bad as before (of course now I probably just jinxed myself).

That's not saying LTSB still hasn't found ways to p*** me off (update hangs, explorer (exe not Internet) crashes, for whatever reason when I try to run CCleaner, the program will launch but waits a few seconds before it starts deleting anything. IIRC 1607 builds have always run like s**t on my laptop)

 

I have a similar issue, that’s been plaguing my win7 x64 for yonks. Can you explain what Eb2a, Eb2b etc.. means, so I can apply some fixes in y rig. I have a 3740Qm AW. M17xr4 (32gb, ATI 7970M all,SSD platform)


.... sorry, just understood what it means

 

Go to that link which takes you to my Dell7577 thread and use those unique codes to look up their entries in my table of contents.

Click each entry's link and read up. Most are only a couple of posts or pages long with the relevant information before the topic changes. I made each link start at the beginning of the pertinent information.

Start with reading through that stuff and trying some of it, then get back to me. I tried to do a decent job explaining it all at the time I was dealing with it.

Btw, I'm not sure how well those will transfer to Win7 as they were done with Win10 at the time. The Intel graphics context seems to be pretty problematic though. So I'd start with that.

Also I have noticed explorer takes longer when clicking it from your task bar than when using hot key WIN+E. I have also seen other workarounds which basically have you recreate the shortcut manually instead of using the default included shortcut.

 

I have a guess what's going on given that you have both an SSD and HDD, because it's what happens on my desktop. If I'm doing exclusively SSD-based tasks for awhile, or just leave the PC idle/use one program for an extended time, eventually my hard drive stops spinning to save some power. Then if, say, I open a Run prompt and type D:\Documents to open my moved-to-HDD My Documents folder, it'll take a few seconds to load, and if the room is quiet (and because it's a 3.5" drive), I can hear the hard drive spinning up. Once it's spun up, I can access all the files on it in normal time.

It's mildly annoying, but I figure it probably does add up to a decent amount of power saved. Haven't bothered into seeing whether there's a way to change it. The particular drive I'm using that powers down is a Toshiba 2 TB 7200 RPM HDD from 2013.

 

I've had the same problem on my desktop. I use a 6TB HDD for media storage, and two SSDs for OS and programs/data. If the HDD is off, and I open File Explorer, it will freeze until I hear the HDD finish spinning up. Similarly, one network share (though not all of them) cause significant latency at File Explorer startup, too. It was most annoying on my laptop, which is SSD-only. I am surprised that Windows File Explorer is this poorly behaved when it comes to dealing with latency on a multidisk system.

 

I'm pretty sure it's due to hardware/firmware, not Windows Explorer. Or at least not primarily Windows Explorer. The disk powers down after a certain amount of time with no requests; no matter which program requests access next, it will take time to spin up. And I've seen this occasionally - perhaps I'm in a browser and go to download a file, and the "Choose where to save" dialog defaults to D:\, because that's where I last saved a file. If the hard drive has powered down, the browser will appear unresponsive for a few seconds as the dialog waits to hear from the disk. I suspect the same thing would happen if I opened a command prompt and went to that drive.

One work around would be to occasionally read a file from the disk through an automated program, but that would also defeat any power savings. Which may be worth it depending on your use case.

Windows Explorer could also do something like cache the top level, but that will eat up RAM whether you need it or not. And it can't cache too much - even a directory/file listing on my 2 TB hard drive would majorly increase Explorer's RAM consumption.

Ultimately a power setting toggle for the drive may be the best option, so the user could choose their preference, but alas I'm not aware of one.

 

Ah, I see what you mean. I agree, the cause definitely starts with the HDD/network share. However, the way I imagined is, was Windows' File Explorer shouldn't freeze the entire application just to wait for one drive/network share. Freeze access to the HDD or network share, sure, but to freeze the entire File Explorer?

 

This is the same setup I have but 2TB for media, 2 SSD's for OS and the other for programs

All my drives but one is always on. About a 5 sec wait time (sleeping) before the start up with the 2 other I think the main reason is the manufacturer set it up this way, less drive wear. You really don't need them going all the drives. Each drive should have there own program and maybe there is an option to shut it off or on. One of mine did that is why it's never in sleep mode but never checked the other two because they are not used as much as the other one

 

power options > change plan settings > change advanced power settings > hard disk > turn off hard disk after > bingo!

 

When viewing the offending directory in Windows Explorer, open the dialog where you can choose which columns to display. In Windows 10 this is done by right-clicking on one of the column titles and then selecting More.... On this dialog, deselect/uncheck the Date column. Then select/add either the Date modified or the Date accessed column to replace it. Click OK. The directory should now display quickly in Windows Explorer. This has worked for me on both Windows 7 and Windows 10.

 

I was reading somewhere that those setting in power management would only apply to the system drive - not 2nd drives (I could be wrong though).

What's the typical wakeup time for a 2.5" drive anyhow? I never really considered this to be an issue in my case because I didn't think it'd be anymore than 1s. for a drive to wake up. It does make sense since the problem does seem similar to when I have to wait for my NAS to wake up and go online - just not as long. Even still I'd think <5sec is too long for a 2.5"HDD to wake up

 

Depends on the drive type. I know desktop HDDs may as well be another world, but in my desktop, I've had the gamut of WD HDDs. Black, Blue, Green, and the newer Reds. B/B start up in less than a second, but the Greens took about 2-3 seconds and the Reds are near 4 seconds. Either way, I'm happy that I have SSDs only on my laptop, and when it becomes possible, I hope to remove the last HDD I have from my desktop - a 6TB Green. It's by far the nosiest part of my desktop.

The Reds took so long to startup I banished them to a NAS, where the long startup isn't quite as annoying. Greens are the quietest of the bunch, so I've put up with their long startup time.

 

Aren't the Reds specifically designed for long term NAS use?

 

Oh, they are. I just thought they would be a slight step up from Greens, and all of the paper specs support that notion. In practice, it ended up not being the case.