Windows 11 file explorer is slow, lagging, hangs!

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.

Oh My Goodness! THANK YOU for posting this!!!
I do a lot of work on photo archives and have a blazingly fast gaming desktop PC with all the best performance optimizations and no network or cloud drives....

I have been trying for months to get windows 11 file explorer to run properly and have tried many of the fixes so many people have posted on the previous 16 pages... (Note, I have zero of these file explorer issues in an older windows 10 pc with same files/folders.)

Some have helped a little but the biggest issue for me is that opening folders with many files takes soooo long (default is to sort by date descending) as to make this high performing PC unusable. Literally 1/2 hour to sort 1000 files if it completes at all. As described above, I simple tried adding the date created column and deleting the date column and now... wait for it.... it works perfectly! Instantaneous sorting of a 2000 file folder for example by all the columns left (name, date created, size and type).

How badly MS is messing up on this has been described well in many of the previous posts. I can only say how relieved I am to be able to hopefully have this frustration behind me. Thank you beattsjunkyy !

Question: Does anyone know how to apply this to all folders in a directory?

...and THAT is why a monopoly is a bad thing! Granted, Microsoft does not actually have a monopoly, they have become SOOOOO big, that they act like it and completely ignore the individual user.

Or we can try a different file explorer.