Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

For me, everything worked fine before April 2023. I never had any network drives and it's still laggy as hell now. Even memory card reader speeds dropped down to 15MB/s, which is ridiculously slow. The Windows Explorer has turned into a freaking malware. I'm very disappointed. I'm working with photos and videos on my machine, and a simple left click on files freezes it for 5-10 seconds ... on a 12-gen Intel workstation with NVMe SSD! So annoying! I've tried a few tricks (mentioned here before) to fix it and something did work for 2 weeks (I think removing the OneDrive helped). But then the problem was back again and nothing helps anymore. It's a nightmare. The worst part is that "the support" is trying to fix me (while trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong), instead of fixing their own mess. And it's almost impossible to find any potential solutions among all the insulting ones suggesting that I must be an idiot using slow HHDs, not enough RAM or having whatever usual "grandpa's computer" issues.

Yes, removing all mapped network drives from quick access did the main improvement for me too.

Before that, File Explorer apparently tried to connect to each network drive anew every time I opened a new file explorer window AND even when using an open or save as dialog from within another application! This would take up to a minute each time (when working from a location with slower internet connection and VPN network drives)!

I also changed the starting page of File Explorer, which took some additional seconds to load.
File Explorer > Click "Options" > (General tab) > "Open File Explorer to" > Change to "This PC"

IIRC Windows 10 also tried to connect to these network drives, but it only did that once every reboot!

...

It's ridiculous! Windows 11 was released more then 1,5 years ago and still has such basic problems!

I feel like Windows 7, 8, 10 all were improvements on the same, solid design. And now the Windows 11 designers and programmers threw everything away without having the slightest clue on:

1. What made Windows work and why it was designed like that (did they even read the UI guidelines?!)
   and
2. How to design, create and test something new in the first place.

Windows 11 is all about some fancy look (which is a matter of taste anyway) and is so much worse in terms of functionality and productivity. Most people use Windows for working. It's not a mobile phone where people just use chat apps or look at instagram or youtube. What were they thinking?!

I've been a satisfied Windows user since Windows 95 and now I'm seriously considering switching to Linux.

I work at an office where they use 10/11, we build alot of files (picturse/videos/sounds). All of the computers using win 10 and especially 11, all have the same issues.

Sorting by date often hangs or makes the window unresponsive.

Entering/leaving folders have like 0.4 secs lag before it shows up

Opening or show folder from google chrome often takes up 10 seconds before showing up the explorer

Searching for a file in your start menu and wanting to show the containing folder? just wait 10-50 seconds before it shows up. and often you click it multiple times, so windows explorer will show up 20 times in your screen.

There is one pc machine, a very trusted little beast. A geforce 980 GTX, i7 2600k, 24 gb ram. This friend still uses windows 7, has billions of files, and does NOT show these annoying little problems. folder click boom open, sort date, boom sorted date. doesnt matter hwo many files there are in a folder.

All these windows 10/11 machines takes up so many extra time, it actually costs me more man hours.

Now you are saying: Oh sorry to hear, please do these things and perhaps now it works?! A.K.A. here, waste more time. Congratiolations on your 10 years MVP award, I guess giving away useless awards is more important then actually making a fast system, like you used to have when win xp/7 was around.

This post will help nothing, i think windows will be still slow and **** in the next 20 years, and the reason is generation Z developers having no actual clue. What a mess.

Microsoft: Here, enjoy wasting more time!

Hello again -

Where are the results I requested you to post back for each step, so I'd know what else to suggest?

This is an interactive process. I give steps to perform, you do each one and then report back results until something works, so I know what to suggest next. If you need help performing any step, just ask back. But please do not skip any steps. We often find out the skipped step is the fix.