Vista File Operations Slow: Green bar in Windows Explorer
Posted By Chris Stinson in Windows on June 9, 2007
Here’s a quick tip for anyone using Windows Vista. When using Windows Explorer (My Computer), you’ll notice that green glow that slides across the location bar when browsing a directory. It is building thumbnails of all files in that particular directory – movie files have a screen capture as the thumbnail. As you can imagine it slows down file operations considerably. To turn this feature off (and speed up your computer), Open up Explorer.exe, go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View. Then go to the Advanced Settings and check “Always show icons, never thumbnails.”
By default, Explorer does not show the file menu, so press ALT-F to show the menu while in the window.
Related posts:
- How to turn off the Image Thumbnail File (thumbs.db) in Windows XP
- Expanding start menu folders very slow in Vista
- Slimming down Windows XP Pro SP2 Install
- A few initial thoughts on Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Released: Improvements!
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10x man.
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I’ve also found that, especially on slow media like CD’s, and in folders with many files, or hard to compute files like movies, calculating what to put into the columns in the details view can take a long time. So, if you have one particularly troublesome folder, right click on the column headings, click More…, and deselect everything. Or, choosing another view might help. Make sure “Remember each folder’s view settings” is set.
Hi!
Thank goodness. Was driving me crazy. Thanks for the info.
-Johnny
Hmm. I still want thumbnails for JPEG files. XP manages to do this without slowing the machine down to a crawl…
Good discussion. I find that if I click on small icons instead of other options, then I can still get my jpeg thumbnails (and psd) without having the progress bar take forever just to display the folder icons for one particular folder that has 5000 subfolders. The folder with the jpegs is a different one, so as long as it remembers my settings from one folder to another, I’m good to go. (Now if it would just remember all of the time…)