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Slowdown of "My Computer" files???

M

Moltnrok

Member
I've owned several computers, and have had a recurring problem on most of them from my old 333 mhz HP Pavilion to my new 1.33 ghz homebuilt.

I'm referring to when clicking on the my computer icon, the wait that is common for drives to show up. Almost like it's not responding for a few seconds. Everything else seems to run fine with maybe a minor slowdown on some programs, but by far most prevalent in My computer.

What causes this? Fragmentation? RAM?

I've pretty much ruled out any shortcomings from the RAM as I have 512 Mb

I've recently optimized my drives with Nortons system works, and I think that also is a defragger, but not certain.

HELP?!?!
 
Could be ACPI-related - if you've got ACPI enabled and your system goes to sleep, it takes a while (2-4 seconds methinks) for the drives to spin up & properly show up in Explorer.

Or is this happening ALL the time?

Fragmented drives make the actual file-reading/writing slower - it shouldn't affect the detection of drives (not to THIS degree at any rate). Depending on which program you ran, Norton Utils will (or won't) do a defrag. Norton's defragging tool is called SPEEDISK - run that & check the fragmentation ratio of your drives.

Btw - has this happened from the install onwards or has this only picked up recently? Some infos pls. 🙂

Oh yeah - you got a Virus-scanner in the background? That could cause a few things. What I guess could ALSO cause some problems is Network-drives/directories. Since You haven't mentioned this, I'll assume the PC is standalone ...?
 
When you open My Computer, windows needs to build a list of files and folders of the contents of all of your drives. The hard drives may already be in explorer, but it will still update the files and folders. If you have a CD/RW with DirectCD or ABCD etc, and the drive has a disk in it, this will really slow it down. Explorer will also check any other removable media to build a file and folder list. If you have Auto insert notification turned off it will add even more time as windows will not automatically know what was on the media you have in the drive. The more drives you have, the longer it will take and if auto insert notification is off it can really strat to get frustrating.
 
Here's a little more info to help pin it down...

everything has been fine until a few days ago...at that point, I was running a cable modem through my router for the firewall protection, and have the same virus scanner I'm using now. I tried removing the cd-r from my burner, which didn't do much, and as near as I can tell, some multimedia files, and a few small shareware programs are all that I've changed since the problem started. Speeddisk has been tried too.
The hesitation works in 2 steps....it takes several seconds for the drives to be found (while that flashlite waves back and forth on the screen), then after they are found, there is another 5 second or so delay for the control panel, printers, dial up networking, and scheduled tasks, and webfolders to be displayed.

This problem (the delay with the control panel) also shows itself not only everytime I enter "my computer", but also whenever I've already opened it, and am just switching between open windows. Hope this helps a bit...see my computer profile for Under construction/purple power for any of that sort info.
Thanks
P.S.-didnt' think about it too much, but come to think of it, windows media player is experiencing a similar slow down, maybe it's related?
 
Your initial post mentioned the problem with your current and past PC's. Based on your last posting, I can only guess it has something to do with your network setup. Do you have mapped drives on other PC's on your network? If you have mapped drives, and another PC on your network is in sleep or suspend, when your PC tries to build the file/folder list, it has to wait for the sleep/suspend PC to "wake up." You can try un-mapping all network resources (This would also include other shared resources as well.) Also, if your router/firewall appliance acts as a DNS server that may be adding some lag as well.
Windows media player is also looking at the same things as Explorer (the windows shell) to find media files as well.
 
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