Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

I have today hopefully quelled the biggest part of my own issue, which had been making my system eventually run as a slow as an Apple I Computer from the 1970's (the slowness is likely due to the Page File being forced to be used as a running app's "main" memory).

I had a similar issue, where I would look in the Task Manager to find 95% of memory being used, and the background Windows Explore app, located near the bottom of Task Manager's Processes list reports using up to 9GB of memory. Restarting it fixed the issue, but then it would eventually build up again (I could watch its memory use climb by the second if I had an external drive open in File Explorer). I am certain my own issue is mainly due to my needing to use external USB 3.0 drives. With the last Windows Update, the issue became MUCH worse (they changed the time when the Indexer ran in the background), and I was restarting explorer hourly. I had already concluded that it was most likely had something to do with Indexing, due to carefully monitoring drive activity, and the new, updated indexer in the last update is now trying to index my external drives while, or after they had already gone into sleep mode. I am suspecting now that if the drive goes to sleep, the indexer, if running on it, just hangs, waiting for drive response, consequentially consuming more and more memory blocks as each read attempt fails.

Thus, very early this morning I went to each external drive's properties and on its General tab, unchecked "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". This might not have TOTALLY eliminated the problem, but I have only had to restart explorer once, and that was this evening. I still think the root issue is due to indexing, though now the drive indexing is minimized, being confined to hashing filenames, no longer being as extensive as it had been by indexing hash codes from their contents as well.

If this issue ends up being due to Indexing, a fix could be to first check if a drive is asleep and issue a wakeup, or else abandon the index attempt. Or make that a user option. I would select the Abandon Indexing if Drive Asleep option.

I imagine this has been posted before but this is what I did and it has been working since I did it 6 months ago. Clicked on 3 dots at top of explorer then OPTIONS then General then clear file explorer history. Explorer now loads up quickly as do files I click on

Does that mean that you can't see any of your word or excel documents in explorer? How do you open them? Open the app and hope you don't have to browse to find them?

Hi,

I have a very strong PC with Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe, Intel i7-9700K, 32GB Memory and ASUS ROG Strix Z390-H Gaming.
When my PC was on Windows 10 there was no problem with File Explorer but after upgrading to Windows 11 I am facing a problem with file explorer slow, lagging, hangs even when just renaming a file.
Only full PC restart is solving the problem for a short time.

How to solve this problem on windows 11 please?

Thanks,
AG

Hello, the same thing happened to me. I improved it this way. In "folder options"
 I disabled the "show office.com files" option in the "general" tab "privacy" section.
 I hope it helps, and that they improve this problem, since it cannot take more than 5 
seconds to load the Windows Explorer image.