Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

It has nothing to do with your hardware. Its Windows update 23H2. Microsoft redesign Explorer from the ground up. It’s slow and sometimes doesn’t load at all. You’ll need to downgrade to 22H2 to solve the issue at this time.

Note that this thread precedes 23H2 by a long time. Performance issues in Explorer are not new to 23H2. There are many factors involved, as can be seen by the myriad of solutions posted. Sometimes the big delays are related to metadata scanning, sometimes they're related to recent files links (especially links that point to network files that no longer exist), OneDrive syncing, automatic folder type discovery (which tends to run amuck in Windows 11), and so on. Similar delays can occur in Windows 10, but there does appear to be a bigger issue in Windows 11. Whether it's gotten worse with 23H2 is not clear. It's possible, but some people have reported the opposite.

It has nothing to do with your hardware. Its Windows update 23H2. Microsoft redesign Explorer from the ground up. It’s slow and sometimes doesn’t load at all. You’ll need to downgrade to 22H2 to solve the issue at this time.

In Windows explorer, open the folder on the left explorer tree so the folder contents open on the right of the screen. Right click inside the open folder contents on the right of the screen and select view details if you are not already showing the folder contents in detailed view and you have the thumbnail view option selected.. You should then have 5 colums at the top of the open folder explorer window from left to right showing Name Date Type Size and Tags, this might be diffrent but no worries. At the top of the folder view screen where the colum headers are listed from left to right, right click in the empty part of the column right where the last column ends and you will see a submenu showing the choices of columns you can use to sort the files by. Look at the bottom of this sub menu and select more. You will now have a "choose details" menu showing ALL of the columns you can use to sort the files by inside the folder you have open. From what I have read, the default sort by type for folders in windows 11 is "Date". Sorting the files by date takes so long because windows has to examine every single file, every time it opens this folder, even if the folder was just opened 2 minutes ago. If you remove/uncheck the date, type, and size sort/column option inside the choose details menu and select instead the "date created" column/sort by option, you will now have a new column inside your folder view labeled "date created" and the date, type and size columns should be removed. Most important thing is to remove the "date" column, this is what is making your files take forever to load, every single damn time you open the folder. Now that you have only the "name" and "date created" columns listed in your column view, click and hold down the mouse button on the "date created" column and while holding down the mouse button, drag the column over to the left to where the "name" column is and it should now switch the name column with the "date created" column so the "date created" column is the very first column starting from the left followed by the "name" column. Again, the "date" column should NOT be showing anymore. Get rid of the date column. Once this is done, click once on the "date Created" column and your files will be sorted by the newest file inside the folder. Let windows finish indexing and putting these files in order, it will ***NOT*** take forever but let it finish. Once the files are in order by the newest file inside the folder (ascending, i think), you can click on the same column again to have the files sorted by the oldest file in the folder (decending, i think) if you want. Once this is complete, close windows explorer to save these folder sort properties. Go and open the folder again in windows explorer and your folder SHOULD now open in details view with 2 columns, the "date created" column and the name column, with the "date created" column the primary column. The files should already be sorted by date created as soon as you open the folder, no processing should be occuring. If it is still taking a while to load the files, again let it finish, close the folder and open it again until the files load instantly in the date created order with no lag at all. Once the folder opens instantly you can now right click and select thumbnail view to see the thumbnails of your files. videos, etc. Again close the folder to save the thumbnail view properties and open it again. Your thumbnails should load instantly in order with no lag. Now, if you open this same folder within an application, not windows explorer, the folder sort properties are again going to sort by date and take forever every time you open the folder inside an application. When you oprn the same folder inside an application, again, right click inside the folder, select view details, columns, the same thing you just did for the same folder inside windows explorer. Click cancel and the attributes will be saved, and now when you open the folder inside the application, they will now load instantly just as they did inside windows explorer. I have not figured out how to make this the default option for all folders on my machine, there is a way to do it, but i have not had any success, so i have to do this for every folder, but its worth it. Again, just get rid of the "date" column, this is what is taking windows forver to open folders. FYI, the "date modified" column sort option did not work for ME for this fix, only "date created" had files opening instantly. I might have explained the steps wrong or made a mistake somewhere, so if you have any additional tips or a better way to get this to work, please let us all know. Credit to Foxmatrix on reddit for this workaround, i did not figure this out.

This solved my issue as well. Thanks!