Why is simple stuff sometimes so slow?

[Nothinman]

Why the hell does my right click menu take so long to load?

The first time might take a second as Windows reads the registry for that file type to load any special menu entries, if there's explorer extensions installed they might need to create a menu entry, some menu entries have icons so those might need to be paged in from disk if they're not already cached. I haven't seen it take more than a second or two in a very long time and usually when it does hang it's either network latency because Explorer is pretty bad at interacting with mapped drives and the like or a funky explorer extension causing problems.

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Why the hell does my right click menu take so long to load?

The first time might take a second as Windows reads the registry for that file type to load any special menu entries, if there's explorer extensions installed they might need to create a menu entry, some menu entries have icons so those might need to be paged in from disk if they're not already cached. I haven't seen it take more than a second or two in a very long time and usually when it does hang it's either network latency because Explorer is pretty bad at interacting with mapped drives and the like or a funky explorer extension causing problems.

It can also be as simple as disk latency (or thrashing, etc.) since the resource for the menu is not necessarily read into memory at program initiation. Once it is read, and depending on the rest of the system, it will probably be found in the os disk cache the next time.

But it's probably a combination of all of the above. All of this might be exacerbated if the executable is on a network share.

 

[seemingly random]

Happened to be installing and updating vista on a new pc and remembered this thread, so I'll post results.

After a clean install of vista32 on a 780g/amd4850e/wd640, network disabled pc, vista sp1 install took about 30 minutes from decompressing the 440mb file to completion (after several reboots).

After installing several drivers locally, it then took about 15 minutes to update including downloading 75mb in 16 updates on a 1.5mb dsl connection, installing and rebooting. The vista update check took a couple of minutes. At no time did the pc appear to be hung during all of this.

So, it takes about 45 minutes after the initial vista (non-sp1) install + files copied to the local hd from a usb key.

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Gigabyte's easytune sux - never could get it to run successfully even with the latest version. It keeps crashing in the ui - doesn't seem like much testing was done.