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.

Here is what I found.

It seems to happen because it's opening to "Home". ..... not sure why "Home" is an issue.

I clicked on the 3 dots in the top ribbon.... selected "Options".

In the Folder options window.... General tab.

Change "Open File Explorer to:" .... select "This PC".

For me it opens to my drives first.....from there I can go anywhere..... no frustrating lag.

The numerous responses, with a variety of different remedies, are typical of performance issues. There are some general truths, such as any process that has to examine a lot of files on a network drive, or an old slow flash drive, will take longer than a fast local drive, but there does appear to be some performance issues with File Explorer that are specific to Windows 11.

It's clear that Windows 11 File Explorer runs its automatic folder type discovery far more often than Windows 10 and this is an easily observed behavior. That is, in Windows 10, File Explorer will determine the folder type (e.g. Documents, Music, Pictures), based on the folder contents and then generally leave it alone. You can manually change the folder type in Windows 10 and it will stick. Windows 11, on the other hand, keeps re-running the automatic folder type discovery, making it very difficult (and often impossible) to override what it picks. The re-running of automatic folder type discovery appears to be a significant performance issue.

I set up a test folder with around 1000 pictures, set the view to Details, and enabled the column "Date Taken" (so that File Explorer has to examine the meta data of every file). This configuration is expected to create some delays, but the delays were noticeably worse with Windows 11 compared to Windows 10 on the same hardware.

Taking away the "Date Taken" column made little difference, but what made a dramatic difference was to disable automatic folder type discovery. This can only be done by enabling an option that makes all folders Generic (i.e. General Items). This means that your Pictures, Music, and Videos folders will all be treated as General Items and not have their unique view. If you can live with that, the speed up may be worth it to you.

Please note that automatic folder type discovery only runs on local disks (e.g. C:). It does not apply to removable or network drives. But some removable drives mount as a "Local Disk". Automatic folder type discovery will run on those drives.

Please also note that, with the Generic option set, it should be a simple matter to set specific folder trees, such as Pictures and Music, back to their respective folder types. Unfortunately further bugs in Windows 11 make that difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

TLDR:

From my testing, your best bet for improving Windows 11 File Explorer speed, is to enable the option to make all folders Generic (which causes File Explorer to disable its automatic folder type discovery). You can do that using WinSetView by enabling the Advanced interface and checking the option Make all folders Generic. As per the documentation, also be sure to set your preferred default views (e.g. List, Details, Icons, etc.) and then click Submit.

Please note that this will make all folders have the same view (i.e. Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents will, by default, have the same view as General Items). You can still override the default view, but due to Windows 11 bugs, you may have to override the view one folder at a time.

Thank you it worked only when I cleaned history ^^;