Windows 11 File Explorer EXTREMELY Slow Unless Restarted Every Few Minutes

Anonymous
2023-01-30T20:51:39+00:00

Hello all. I have been researching this issue for a while, but none of the suggested fixes I have found and tried have had any effect. I've tried numerous setting change suggestions with indexing, File Explorer options, etc, but nothing has improved this issue even slightly. Even a complete clean install when I recently upgraded my SSD had no effect.

The issue is that my file explorer starts out normally fast when first opened. For example, opening my downloads folder(located on my desktop) and fully populating all thumbnails, etc, takes about a second the first time you do it. However, within a few seconds that speed is replaced by EXTREMELY slow performance. For example, if I open a subfolder under downloads, then attempt to return to the downloads folder, it will take 45 seconds to 2 minutes to perform the same action is just did in less than 2. During this time, CPU load never exceeds 10%, Disk usage never exceeds 1%, and Memory usage never exceeds 25%. The second or third navigation request within Windows Explorer will start the issue every time. It will stay this way until you restart Windows Explorer from the Task Manager, upon which it will be normal speed again for a few seconds, then immediately revert to the exceptionally slow behavior. It is so slow that the fastest way to navigate is to constantly restart the process every time you need to change folders. All other programs and features operate perfectly normally.

This is not a hardware speed issue, as Windows 10 ran perfectly fine on this machine. It's an i7 8700K with 32 Gigs of RAM on a Gigabyte Z390 with a Samsung Evo 980 M.2 SSD. This should be lightning quick at such tasks.

I could really use a hand here, this is a completely unacceptable situation.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-09-17T13:18:08+00:00

    Hello agin eveyone. OP here. This issue had largely solved itself for me for a few months. I figured they had addressed the cause in one of the updates, Unfortunately, it is now back worse than ever. I went on vacation for a few weeks and came back to a completely unusable computer. I can't even sort through my vacation pictures and videos on my computer, because it will not load the thunbnails.

    At this point, I can't get it to actually fully populate thumbnails in any folder. It simply sits there with the progress bar at roughly 95%, forever as far as I can tell, and refuses to load the most recently added thumbnails, which are my vacation pics. I tried moving them to a subfolder, but that is even worse. In subfolders it will not even identify what type of file it is looking at, and just shows a weird blank white page icon and sits there processing forever.

    Restarting the explorer process yields faster performance for rougly a second, then it immediately bogs down. Restarting the machine does nothing at all as far as I can tell.

    This is a completely unnacceptable situation, and frankly, I want a refund on this POS software.

    Oh, and as a side bonus, the file sort function no longer works correctly. It seems to randomly assign a date to all files, and numerous attempts to get files to appear in the order that they were imported to the machine have met with complete failure. In the past all I had to do was set it to sort by date modified, but now that does not work at all. Files I imported to the computer today will appear in much older sections of the folder, incuding much older than actual file creation. It makes no sense at all.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-08-30T21:43:42+00:00

    Thanks

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-08-30T21:43:19+00:00

    Thanks Legend worked for me.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-08-30T00:02:11+00:00

    Worked for me! Thanks!!!

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-08-23T14:49:34+00:00

    For me once I attached to VPN and my mapped drives resolved the progress bar disappeared.

    WOOHOO!

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