How can I stop automatic folder refreshing?

[brocks]

I upgraded from XP, so this may be old news for Vista users, but it's new to me.

I have some folders that are full of video files - wmv's and avi's. When I say full, I mean thousands. My problem is that every time I add or delete one file, Win7 starts using half my CPU cycles to do go through the whole folder doing something. I think it's refreshing --- a translucent green progress bar slowly covers the address field at the top.

I can stop it by clicking on the red x, but the next time I delete a file, it starts up again. XP would let me go through a folder adding and deleting whatever I wanted, and let me decide when and if I wanted to refresh.

I thought it was reindexing, but I turned indexing off for the folder, and then for the whole drive (it's not on the system drive), but it kept doing it.

Can anybody tell me how to turn this "feature" off? Thank you.

 

[Snapster]

Are you staying in the same folder when you are adding/removing, ie you're not jumping to another to cut/copy a file from?

Sounds like it's creating thumbnail previews or trying to read the files to get video length/dimensions.

To get rid of the thumbnails:
1. Click on the Start button, then on All Programs, follow by Accessories.
2. Run Windows Explorer.
3. In Windows Explorer window, click on Organize button on the menu/shortcut bar.
4. In the pull down menu, click on Folder and Search Options.
5. Folder Options dialog window will appear. Click on View tab.
6. Under the Files and Folders tree heading, check the checkbox next to Always show icons, never thumbnails option.
7. Click the OK button.

Details view might help with the dimensions side of things, or at least you might need to 'remove' the columns by customising the view.

 

[brocks]

Thanks for the response. I'm already in details view. And it happens even if I unRAR some files within the folder.

There may not be an answer for this. I was looking around the web on other boards, and apparently a lot of XP users are having the same trouble, and the consensus seems to be that Autorefresh is a change in Vista, and now Win7, that MS thought would be helpful, and there is currently no way to turn it off. I guess most people don't notice it because they don't have huge folders full of huge files. But a lot of people who do tasks that require that the files they add to go to the bottom of the list, instead of immediately being sorted, are saying it will keep them on XP until there is a way to turn it off.

 

[Doggiedog]

I'm no expert in this at all but I believe it's indexing. There should be a control somewhere to prevent Windows from indexing your files.