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devices and Printers window loads real slow in windows 8.1 and loads fast in windows 7 both are on the same computer as a dual boot system
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It appears to have worked for me too. I removed the RealTek driver and replaced it with the Microsoft HD Audio Device. The device & printers and network folders seem to populate much faster now. I would not expect that an audio driver would cause this issue. I tried many other troubleshooting steps before coming across this post. Thanks for posting this!!!
Agreed. Irritating answer and in the style I have seen before several times.
Try this. Worked for me.
http://itsolutionsblog.net/devices-and-printers-not-loading/
Much to my surprise, Kathleen Marshall's suggestion worked for me too. (Thanks Kathleen!)
Devices and Printers was taking several minutes to load. This was easily reproducible. I started the "Bluetooth Support Service" service and, lo, Devices and Printers now opens straight away. Go figure.
(I do have RealTek audio drivers on my system, but didn't have to touch them, nor did I touch the "Generic volume shadow copy" entries in Device Manager.)
Initially Devices and Printers took about 2 minutes to open.
I have tried all the suggestions here (many thanks for posting) but to no avail.
etc etc
In the end I went back to my original idea of a problem with the build up of Generic volume shadow copies.
Device Manager showed thousands (too many to count) of Generic volume shadow copies attached to one of the hard drives. I reasoned that if I could get rid of them it would solve the problem. However they obviously couldn't be deleted one by one. The only way I could think of doing it would be to uninstall the errant hard drive. However, this held all my data. So what I did (shutting down and switching off the power to the computer and using an anti static wrist strap etc) was to open up the PC and unplug this hard drive. Then back to Device Manager and uninstall the now greyed out hard drive.
All of the Generic volume shadow copies disappeared. The only problem was they all come back when I reconnected the hard drive. So the next stage was to prevent this from happening. So....Control Panel - System - System Protection. All the drives are listed under Protection Settings. I clicked on the errant hard drive and then Configure. Ensure Restore Settings is set to 'Disable System Protection' and Disk Space Usage - Max Usage slider is set to hard left (0?). Then Delete all restore points for this drive. - Delete. Apply - OK.
Restart computer.
Now all the Generic volume shadow copies have gone and stay gone! It wasn't actually as straight forward as that as it entailed lots of trial and error and restarts.
Now Devices and Printers only takes 15 seconds to load which is possibly about the best it is going to get.
As always it is imperative to do a backup before you start!
I have turned off System Protection for all my drives (including 'C'. However it may be better to leave this protected?). System Restore never seemed to work properly anyway. I rely on the free version of EaseUS ToDo which works a treat.
Again, many thanks to Microsoft for setting problems for retirees with lots of spare time on their hands to try to solve.
PS Just tried Devices and Printers and it loaded instantaneously!
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Like Dillon_642 I had also muddled through lots of useless "solutions" about enabling Bluetooth services and updating Realtek drivers before giving up on Devices and Printers entirely until I found this solution by accident -- I was actually looking for a solution to why my PC was taking longer and longer to boot. Turns out I had over 16,000 ghost shadow copies, which are enumerated both at boot and when opening D&P, slowing both down.
A Windows bug prevents old shadow copies from being deleted when a backup program is done with them and they build up over time. Microsoft has released a hotfix that fixes the bug and a tool called devnodeclean to clean up the ghost shadow copies. I didn't bother with the hotfix, just made a daily scheduled task to run devnodeclean.
