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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
    2023-10-30T16:24:26+00:00

    Good evening.

    I have made this change a few weeks ago when I read your first posting about it and it definitely improved the performance of the laptop.

    Very big difference for sure. Just disappointed that Windows 11 has become like this. Very disappointing for sure.

    Hope they get it sorted soon.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-10-30T02:34:09+00:00

    +1

    Please fix, this should be treated as an outage and severe regression. I have 10K+ media files (Photos, videos) on my SSD-only high-end PC and explorer is taking ~10s everytime I opened a media folder.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-10-22T14:45:10+00:00

    100% agreed!

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-10-22T08:13:31+00:00

    Exactly so Alan. The problems have been ongoing for around a year now and none of the latest upgrades fix things. In another forum someone said that Explorer has a persistent memory leak which Microsoft have not been able to fix. Also half the taskbar icons disappeared after an update in February and cannot be made to reappear no matter what is tried, and .PNG file icons are still just blanks in Explorer. It really is an appalling state of affairs.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-10-05T19:59:12+00:00

    Thanks Brian, this worked!

    Press the Windows key.

    Type “SystemPropertiesAdvanced”.

    Click “Run as administrator”.

    Click “Settings”.

    Select the “Advanced” tab.

    Select “Change”.

    Make sure the checkbox “Automatically managing paging file size for all drives” is not checked.

    Select a drive (C:) that you want to have its paging file size system managed.

    Select System managed size option, click Set button.

    Click OK.

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