Windows File file listing painfully slow

Question

I am using Windows 7 64-Bit Home Premium with 500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Hybrid SSD drive.

Lately my system has slowed down painfully: listing file in a directory using Windows Explorer or any other program with standard Windows open dialog, takes sometimes as much as 30 seconds to list just contents of a directory. Restarting Windows sometimes makes it better and I've observed that at times when the problem is occuring, it occurs over and over till a reboot.

I've tried SeaTools to monitor SMART data of drive but it seems all OK. I've tried booting Linux and accessing files from there; performance seems to be satisfactory through Linux.

I'm confident that there is some piece of Software (either an application or some driver) that is causing issue on Windows. But I'm not sure exactly how to figure it out. I've tried Process Explorer but couldn't really figure out the bottleneck creator. Whats the best way to troubleshoot this?

Answer 1

Don't defrag a hybrid SSD, it can ruin the drive. seagate source. If you defraged the drive before the problem started, that might be what caused the problem. You might want to try to disable super-fetch. Also frequent anti-virus scans can reduce performance.

Enter performance monitor from an elevated command prompt (run as administrator) to run a system diagnostic or also generate user defined data sets (run a few base line tests after a boot up & when the problems are happening).

System preset tests : Performance Monitor > data collector sets > system > right click system diagnostic > start. (It will stop on it's own)

OR

Performance Monitor > data collector sets > system > system performance

User Defined: Performance Monitor > data collector sets > user defined.

right click user defined select new > data collector set name the report (i use performanceReport)

select the create manually radio button > next > select the performance counter radio button click next > add

select the counters you want to monitor, click finish.

The collector set will appear in the left panel, to start it, right click and choose start. Manually stop it by right click > stop.

When done the reports will appear in the reports file.

Answer 2

1. Scan for malware using an updated AV and a program such as Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

2. Defragment the drive

3. Try different folder views (Details, List etc.), and disable any columns that might be pulling metadata from files (such as EXIF tags from images or ID3 tags from audio files)

4. Right-click the (root) folder / Properties / Customize tab and try changing the folder template to General Items (can also make this setting propagate to all sub-folders using the checkbox)

5. Use ShellExView to disable all shell extensions, reboot and see if there's any change

Answer 3

It shouldn't be needed in Win 7 but try it.

These keys store folder setting (view, order, etc) for each folder opened for each alternate instance, so basically multiple settings for one folder. They should be pretty big if you export them to a reg file.

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\
delete Bags
delete BagMRU
create the key Bags
in it create a DWORD entry called 'BagMRU Size' and give it a 5000 value in hexa.

I've listed 32 bit locations, for 64 bit you'll have to search in WOW64/WOW32 and similar places, for the 32 bit explorer.