Why does Windows take ages to open a dir with lots of files?

[probedb]

Hi folks,

Not sure if you can help but I'm wondering why Windows takes absolutely ages to open directories with lots of files (1000s) on them?

It's as if it's scanning the whole directory before opening.

Puter is XP and filesystem is NTFS. It's a network drive but it also does it locally even with indexing turned off?

Any ideas how I can speed this up?

Cheers!
Paul.

[arthurleung]

Would say upgrade to Vista/Win7 and perhaps upgrade your LAN.
Never experienced any lag even with 10000s of files in a Vista/2008/Win7 exclusive network on GbE.

[Jay]

what type of files are they and what view are you using?

[Agent]

If it's anything with a thumbnail (like videos or images), turning that off can make a huge difference.

[probedb]

Network is fine, gigabit all round. It's my music directory (yes it's all perfectly legal!) so contains lots of FLACs and folder.jpgs but no thumbnails?

It does it locally not just across network shares.

I'm upgrading to WIn 7 next weekend so I'll see what happens after that I guess. I just thought maybe it was a common problem

[BobF64]

Anti-virus? something else that scans files?

Try running some monitoring tool to see whats causing it?

Given that its both local and network, its most likely something on your PC doing something.

[spoon_]

Do you have Windows Desktop Search 4 installed?

[itslate]

I had a similar problem with XP sp3 with directories with large amounts of files, music, and photos mainly. It struggles in thumbnail view, but also details view aswell.

I just did a clean up and removed some unused programs and it seemed to sort itself out.

[Traajel]

Network is fine, gigabit all round. It's my music directory (yes it's all perfectly legal!) so contains lots of FLACs and folder.jpgs but no thumbnails?

It does it locally not just across network shares.

I'm upgrading to WIn 7 next weekend so I'll see what happens after that I guess. I just thought maybe it was a common problem

If you have .jpg files in there, Windows will be automatically trying to cache thumbnail views of them, which could be slowing it down. Not sure if Windows 7 does this too (not had time to test Win7 yet) but I'm assuming it will when you upgrade. You can turn this off by opening Explorer, then going to Tools -> Folder Options -> Select the View tab -> Tick "Do not cache thumbnails". This might help speed things up a bit.

Do you have Windows Desktop Search 4 installed?

+1. Windows Desktop Search (+ other index/search programs such as Google Desktop Search/Nero Desktop Search etc.) give a huge performance loss in my experience. If you have it installed I would strongly advise removing it.

You may also want to try a defrag of the partition to help your HDD be able to read the file metadata that little bit quicker.

[probedb]

Caching of thumbnails is one of the first things I turn off....and never have indexing on or install Windows Desktop Search.

Have told ESS to not have it's real time protection on for network drives to see what happens with those.

As I say I'll wait until I get Win 7 sorted and see if anything is improved.

Cheers for the replies!