My File Explorer *freezes* when loading a large amount of files at the same time

I have an samsung SSD evo 840 and a 4TB green WD hard drive. When I open my green wd hard drive which contains many files after few minutes the explorer crashes. I am still able to move my mouse and my caps key and num lock key are all working. ctrl+alt+del does not work. I am trying to figure out what the problem is.

Thank you for the help !

Also before I moved on to SSD I was using 32 bit os with WD black drive with the WD 4TB green drive. Explorer would crash but I would be able to reload the explorer since ctrl+alt+del worked. For 64 bit OS I have 8gb of ram.

Jin

Posted 2014-08-09T17:29:28.573

Reputation: 11

please define "many" – Tarnay Kálmán – 2014-08-09T17:36:21.433

also are all those files in the root of the drive? – Tarnay Kálmán – 2014-08-09T17:36:54.710

many being 500 - 1200 files. and 500 for root for folder 1000 or more files. – Jin – 2014-08-09T18:51:28.997

I just reformatted and It was indeed the OS issue not a hardware issue. I was able to determine this when I was checking options for folder on and off if I did this repeatedly 10 times very fast the system would just freeze so it was obvious that windows OS was corrupted to the core.

Thanks for all the help again. – Jin – 2014-08-09T23:27:52.343

Answers

You can try to check if there's any problem with the File Explorer Index.

Having a bad index increases search time for huge directories. If you try to search from the Start Menu, it can be worse.

A few users delete or limit their File Explorer Index because it is known to use a big amount of memory.

If all your files are indexed, you'll have experience a huge CPU load because the computer is loading the whole index. A File Explorer Index is only useful for folders or applications that are accessed frequently.

You can go write "Search" in your Start Menu search to Manage your Indexing Options.
Under Tools -> Folder Options, you can change a few search options.

I would recommend to follow those steps before attempting anything else.

Good luck !

Note : File Explorer Index Corruption is Rare. Don't search for corruptions.

Uncreative Name

Posted 2014-08-09T17:29:28.573

Reputation: 64

Explorer should not choke on 500 - 1200 files. It's probably some Explorer extension that is messing up your Explorer. I would recommend the excellent autoruns tool. Start it up as admin. Set it to hide Microsoft stuff (Options->Filter->Hide Microsoft entries). Let it find all things. Navigate to the Explorer tab, and feel free to uncheck anything/everything on that tab that you suspect as culprit. Unchecking things on that tab should be safe. You can also reenable them anytime by adding the checkmark back. To see the effects of disabling these extensions, you need to restart explorer.exe, which you can do by opening task manager, killing explorer.exe on the processes tab, and then starting it by File->Run task: explorer.exe

I recommend not closing autoruns while restarting explorer.exe, so that in case something goes wrong, you can easily undo it.

Also, I recommend that you kill explorer.exe during your testing when you see that it has frozen.

Tarnay Kálmán

Posted 2014-08-09T17:29:28.573

Reputation: 3 457