Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

Clean install, of a freshly downloaded, current build of Win11 onto Dell Precision 7730 with a formatted NVMe SSD. (i7-8850H, 32Gb, Quadro P3200)

There is NOTHING on this PC other than Windows. 

Click File Explorer……. 3 seconds later it opens and a few more ticks before it renders the menu… annnnnnd then the folder structure. 

Click on a folder and w a  i  t     f  o  r     i  t….  to  finally open the next folder and display the content.

(Don’t get me started on the Right click, Show more Options… and click again to finally reward me with the menu that I need to use… that looks the same as it did since WinXP)

2 things that totally frustrate the workflow and user experience… every time... all day.

Meanwhile I’m writing this using a HP Z400 running Win7 with File Explorer windows that open in milliseconds and folder navigation is like I’m using mental telepathy, with the mouse click just acting as confirmation….

All while running 60 odd tabs across 12 sessions of Firefox, listening to youtube videos,  5 Excel workbooks, 5 Word Docs, 8 Acrobat Sessions, 20 Notepad instances, RDPing to a remote Server AND having 10 other instances of File Explorer open! (And still have 7gb of RAM free)

When a 4 year old Workstation running the latest and greatest OS Microsoft has to offer, is having its **** handed to it by a 12 year old PC running a 14 year old unsupported OS made by the same company… then I think I can safely say that Microsoft has truly lost its way and started drinking from the same CoolAid Fountain as Google and Facebook et al by burning vast amounts of time and money adding telemetry that takes up system and network bandwidth and shoving in ‘cool’ ‘new’ ‘features’ that literally no one asked for, all at the expense of having an operating system that can’t even do the most basic of functional user requirements – finding, managing, using files.   

<Sarcastica> Ooo but doesn’t it look pretty… I guess… kinda like an off brand imitation of a Mac… </Sarcastica>

I have burnt HOURS trying to resolve this… registry hack this, delete system files that, cmd and powershell script something else out the way, update drivers, update windows, reboot, more update windows, reboot… FFS… even more update windows…

I’ve now downgraded it back to the final* build of Win10. 

Thankfully, Microsoft decided to stop messing around with that, so at least I’ll have 2 years of using it to actually be productive, and achieve things.  You know, use it for what I bought it for… rather than trying to kludge my way around this months ‘cool’ ‘new’ ‘feature’ that you decided to let the new intern (or Tay 2.0) have a crack at shoehorning straight into your production codebase… after all… you can rely on the large number of ‘staff’/users to do all the testing… hey, you could even make some coin on the side by selling their data.

*Remember back in 2015 when Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows?  Yeah… you shoulda listened to the marketing dept… and stopped at 10.

This is coming from someone who has been working in IT professionally for well over 25 years and coding since the Vic-20 was a thing.

30,000 years ago some bright spark attached a handle to a rock and created the hammer.  A simple yet extremely powerful tool for increasing productivity.  So simple a child could use it.  Sure, the aesthetics and material of the hammer may have changed over time… but no one, in 30,000 years of making hammers, decided it was a good idea to move the head of a hammer, into the middle of the handle!

It took Microsoft 26 years to do that with Windows.

This… is not progress.

I have noticed that since multiple tabs were added, File Explorer can slow down because old instances close, but do not seem to always release their resources. This can slow File Explorer to a crawl. If we look under Task Manager / Processes, then scroll to the bottom for the Windows Explorer entry down there (not the ones that might be at the top). we might find that instead of it having a ~65MB footprint, it can be as high as several GB. I have seen it climb as high as 8GB before it becomes so slow as to hang on simple tasks. Sometimes there is another copy running down there, at about the right size, but we can ignore it, though we can restart it, which will instead just close it. On the huge one, select it, then select Restart Task at the top. This will close this monster and restart it at the proper size. It will also close the Status Bar, but only momentarily. The status bar will return intact after Explorer restarts. If any File Explorer instances were up on the screen (the ones reflected at the top of the Processes List), they will still be there.

Hope they get this fixed soon. The above workaround is better/faster than a System Restart, but it is lame we have to do it at all. Driving me nuts!

HGi, there is no folder "AutomaticDestinations" in the "recent" folder? This is surely a bug with Windows 11, I have 3 new dell laptops all with the same issue. It is really quite annoying

It should be there. Try pasting this entire path into Explorer's navigation bar and then press Enter:

C:\Users%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

Sure it is a windows bug, i have 2 lenovo X1, the old one is gen6 another is new gen11, also my PC with AMD7950x3D are same happen. my new gen11 1st start and complete all updates then the happen start..... I think this issue won't occur on a brend new device, so this is a bug. I can temporary fixed with the tips (switch off all function and remove all File Explorer history). Why introduce these function but these functions need to be switched off 🤣