what is that green bar that fills across the address/directory box in windows explorer?

That thing is contantly working, and sometimes it chugs. What is it, can I turn it off safely? If so how do I turn it off? Just in general my Windows Explorer performance seems very poor. This laptop is an i7 720 with 8 gb ram, and if anything it is slower (in Windows Explorer) than my P8600 4gb system. Especially if the folder contains movies, the window pane showing the icons is painfully slow to load. We're talking several seconds per few icons.

Skipping ahead in a movie using Jump in MPC is also slower in this i7 machines than in my P8600. I really don't get it; CPU consumption shows like 2% but there's a lag when I jump ahead that isn't there in my P8600 machine. It's just this one thing; apps load/run faster, games are faster, etc, but skipping ahead in movies, is slower.

Hmph very annoying. I don't even know what to ask.

 

Ahh... so if I turn off thumbnails that will speed it up? With thumbnails, is that a constant drain on system resources, or does it do the one read and then store the info so you stop taking a performance hit? I love my icons sniff. But I hate this momentary lag before all the icons load. And my 2 TB external that's filled with family vids and raw imgs -- forget it, I lose patience and switch to Details. And I still don't get why my P8600 is faster at loading thumbnails. And also, why when I switched from MPC built in decoder to ffdshow and back, some of the thumbnails changed. Where do I even find the setting for thumbnails lol I should ask that. Is it just a matter of switching the View to Details or List, is that all you can do?

The hdd is a Seagate 320gb 7200 rpm. It seems to be fine, in terms of copying files, playing games, etc. Nothing is running other than the usual AV real time shields and such.

 

It normally will cache the thumbnails for future usage.

 

If I have a window of say 50 medium icons, not all of them appear at once -- most will pop up right away, and then it takes a few seconds for the rest to load. That much is fine. But it takes longer on this 720qm with 8gb than it does on a P8600 with 4gb. Is that normal? I know core 2 duos sometimes have higher clock speeds and if multiple cores aren't needed, a C2D might be faster than an i7 -- I've heard that. So if this is normal, fine. But if not, how do I even begin to diagnose where a potential problem might be?