Windows 11 File Explorer EXTREMELY Slow Unless Restarted Every Few Minutes

I wish I knew. The problem is not getting better, it's getting worse, and I am seriously considering abandoning Windows 11 because of it.

For me I slowly accumulate video and photo files as I enjoy photography and videography. Once my SSD gets full I have to sort through all of the video and photos and decide which ones are worth keeping long term, edit the video down to what I really want/need, and then offload everything to a storage drive, of which I now have several, for long term storage.

The photos and videos are all stored in separate folders to keep things from blending together. Every single time I go into a folder, or back out of a folder, windows acts like it has to completely rediscover every file on the entire PC and build thumbnails of them, etc. I need the thumbnails as quick references, so turning off the convenience features etc. isn't really an option for me.

At this point, the only real way to navigate through the file structure is to constantly restart file explorer. That buys you about 30 seconds of normalish performance before it craps out again. I keep task manager up literally all of the time for this specific reason.

Microsoft, you need to fix this ****! It's been ages and you have done nothing. You broke windows explorer, it used to work just fine, just revert to the old code if you need to, or at least offer that as an option.

Not sure what it is in your case but I just tested a folder with over 2,200 stock images to be used with graphic design on Windows 11 and it loads fine.

To note, thumbnails at extra large require about 600MB of RAM for about 2,200 images. This increases the size of Windows thumbnails cache on the drive by 100MB.

It also must reload all the thumbnails from storage every time you go back into the folder and cache it all in RAM so drive speed (SSD verses HDD, etc), drive free space (including drives over 50% full hitting a speed loss, TRIM issues, low on space, etc), RAM free space, RAM speed, CPU speed, page file being used too much, even GPU as Windows uses that to function unless you disable it), and possibly more will all play a part in how well it goes for you.

Also, if any cleaning tool wipes out the cache file then thumbnails will have to be recreated. If any storage issue causes loss of caching then thumbnails will have to be recreated.

There's a lot more here that it may not be File Explorer at fault. Not saying it can't be as they have fixed in the past other issues triggered by doing certain events or things in a certain order or way.

Should also note that if you happen to use OneDrive than that there will certainty slow things down. Its the catch 22 on that.

However, I'm a programmer and File Explorer's infinite scrolling file list and its caching is working correct. Its quickly pulling in the thumbnails from the drive cache as the view is being scrolled and is caching them all into memory to keep it fluid and smooth as well as dynamically loading them into each file holder of the list. Then flows even faster after that as scrolling is done because its all in RAM. It then unloads as the folder is left and upon going back it repeats to the top of this paragraph. That is how this stuff works and its indeed doing it as it should.

Hope the best :)

Yeah, the problem is mine does not do that, as in work like it should. I don't use One Drive, have well and truly fast enough hardware to run this with no issue and indeed it does run with no issue for a few seconds to a minute each time you restart the process. That alone demonstrates clearly that the hardware is not the issue, nor is the settings. It's something in the software that was changed from previous Windows versions, because this same hardware ran blazing fast on windows 10. The only delay I ever had before was when I was accessing a spinning platter storage drive, which is to be expected vs SSD.

Many people are having this problem, I've found literally dozens of help threads asking for assistance with this exact issue. Someone at Microsoft needs to start taking it seriously and find a fix. Changing settings does nothing at all for this issue, I've spent hours and hours trying suggestions from all of these threads, nothing works, even slightly.

I have same issues on fast machine (i9-12900 64m M2). In addition often my USB keyboard is not

very responsive. Have used resource manager and Process Lasso and a 3rd party replacement for file manager, all with little success. I rarely tax this machine above 10%cpu primarily for my ham radio programs. It also occurs when I am running nothing!

Grrrrrr!

"Me too" to all the complaints about the search function in File Explorer. Snails would be ashamed to move so slowly. The fundamental purpose of File Explorer software is to explore files; if it requires a Microsoft MVP to give users a long list of possible fixes for such a basic tool as searching, the software is basically not fit for purpose. This really needs to be fixed.