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I am constantly dragging files from Explorer to the Recycle Bin. My Recycle bin is on my desktop, the left side of my screen. When I drag those files out of the Explorer window means my mouse usually moves over where Explorer lists "Favorites" and "Libraries" etc. Just the act of the mouse being on top of Libraries is enough to cause Explorer to stop and "poll" all my hard drives (I have 6), making them all wake from sleep. This causes Explorer to freeze for 5-15 seconds when all I wanted to do was drag and drop a file to the recycle bin, or my desktop, etc. This is extremely annoying!
The question: Is there a way to prevent Explorer from unnecessarily waking up all my hard drives just because my mouse moved over my "Libraries" on the left side?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
+Anil Kumar:
You have COMPLETELY missed the point of this problem. It is NOT about drive performance, it is about a boneheaded move by the OS to WAKE DRIVES FROM SLEEP MODE when the mouse just happens to PASS OVER the shortcut for that drive.
Worse, when it does that, the mouse cursor hangs for the time it takes the drives to wake up. This appears as a "freeze".
I know this is an old thread, but I stumbled over it when I was looking for a solution. Since I have found one now, here it is. https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1884-mouse-hover-time-change.html
Basically the "MouseHoverTime" value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Mouse in the registry has been reduced to a ridiculously low value. Who did it? I don't know. In my case, it was 8 (ms)! By changing it back to the default value of 400, my problem is solved. Hope this is useful for everyone.
Hi, I'm the original poster, I'm back after many months to give the true answer to this question, mostly for those who find this on Google for years to come.
Here is the only solution I've found. It's quite technical, are you ready?
Move the recycling bin to the other side of the screen.
....Move the recycling bin icon to the right side of the screen (right click your desktop and turn off the 'auto arrange icons' option so you can do this), then you will never have to drag anything to the left over-top of your sleeping hard drives, thus avoiding the annoyance of one of Microsoft's most obvious & overlooked bugs.
Hey Microsoft - you should fix this. It is only becoming more common for people to have multiple hard drives, and in such cases they are often using "power saving" and sleeping when inactive. You're very very rude people for awakening them unnecessarily. You don't need to 'poll' my hard drives just because something was dragged across my screen! This is a hideous flaw in Explorer and should have been addressed already.
this behavior has been bugging me ever since i installed windows 7
it has nothing to do with a virus or third party apps
its to do with the time the system is set to act when a file is held over a folder ect
it either does not have a time variable set or its so low that it reacts instantly to a file passing over
the library section of "windows explorer" not internet explorer
what the op and myself want to know is how can we adjust the timing variable that will affect the reaction time of a file passing over the library section so it does not start all the hard drives.
simple ..... is the timing variable contained in the registry ?
Another point to note is this is a super mother when you map network drives.
