Question Windows 11 is garbage....why is Explorer lagging and locking up CONSTANTLY??

[Ronstang]

I'm really getting tired of the garbage MS keeps shoveling out. This machine was perfect until about a week or two ago when the network stopped working due to an update....then started working again when the other machine (W10) updated but now this brand new W11 machine is a dog. I can't do anything without lagging or locking up. I can't even organize files as File Explorer is constantly NOT RESPONDING. Last night just trying to move files from an NVMe to a large hard drive slowed down to the point of ridiculous. I can't use any of my software anymore as it either takes forever to load or stops responding.

Same software on the other machine works perfectly and I can save the files to this machine over the network completely fine....so it is not the drives or the new HBA SAS card I just installed. It is only when using this machine itself that the problem exists so this is a W11 issue.

Any ideas....this is getting frustrating.

EDIT: For some reason half the time the machine is crawling I find a bunch of Edge entries in Task Manager that is either using a lot of resources or maxing it out. I then have to force them to stop. I haven't even opened this garbage software so why does it start by itself and start taking over the machine.

 

[Tech Junky]

Boot to Linux from a USB drive and delete the app. Problem solved.

Also, look into explorer patcher as an alternative to unlock explorer options the zapped in 11.

 

[WelshBloke]

Explorer has always been a bit janky, that's nothing to do with win11.

"Copying file.... 2 minutes to go.... 150 seconds... 30 seconds... 3 minutes... 30 minutes... 10 seconds..."

 

[WelshBloke]

EDIT: For some reason half the time the machine is crawling I find a bunch of Edge entries in Task Manager that is either using a lot of resources or maxing it out. I then have to force them to stop. I haven't even opened this garbage software so why does it start by itself and start taking over the machine.

Edge is set to start with windows by default and run in the background at all times. If you don't use Edge or don't want that feature I'd highly recommend that you go to the settings and turn it off.

Edit: Edge settings>System and performance>toggle off startup boost and continue running bacgground extensions...

 

[lantis3]

Try alternatives

Free File Explorer Alternatives: 25+ File Managers & Similar Apps | AlternativeTo

The best free alternative to File Explorer is Double Commander, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to...

alternativeto.net

12 Best TeraCopy Alternatives: Top File Copy Utilities in 2023 | AlternativeTo

The best TeraCopy alternatives are FastCopy, Ultracopier and Robocopy. Our crowd-sourced lists contains more than 25 apps similar to TeraCopy for Windows, Mac, Linux, PortableApps.com and more.

alternativeto.net

 

[Ronstang]

I thinks I misspoke....I think it is a Windows Explorer issue since it affects EVERYTHING with latency or simply locking up until the desktop goes white, file explorer shuts down, all my icons disappear....then the icons come back and finally the taskbar and now I can see my programs that are actually still running. But is seems to screw up my current recordings on my cable card in emby.

 

[Tech Junky]

cable card in emby.

Linux is your friend for OTA or Cable. Much more stable once it's up and running.

Explorer crashing though is just part of Windows experience. W10 wasn't as bad but, there are some quirks to deal with in W11. First thing is to disable updates and selectively install what seems high priority and skip the rest. The updates tend to make more issues than they resolve. I block them in both the OS and by DNS though to be safe. I might check for patch Tuesday relevancy every other month and apply a single update instead of the barrage of updates MS pushes daily.

 

[Ronstang]

I can't switch to linux, almost all the software I rely on every single day is cottage industry stuff and mostly open source or just enthusiast contributions and almost none of them have a linux version. I simply don't have time to upend and relearn 40 years of computer use. I actually have some programs from 30+ years ago I still use occasionally....this all started when I digitized my LP collection in 2000 and used AIPL Singulator. A program I still dust off every once in a while when I find a rare album that is only available on vinyl.

 

[WelshBloke]

CMD>SFC /scannow

 

[Ronstang]

CMD>SFC /scannow

Yeah, I forgot about that and ran it and it said it found corrupt files....but WHY? This machine is 6 months old and has 3 new SSDs in it, one of the two NVMe 2TB drives is the windows drive. There is no problems with my SSDs. How can Windows keep breaking itself? I will have to see if this actually fixed the issue though.

If windows crashes can it corrupt the files itself without there actually being disc errors?

 

[WelshBloke]

If windows crashes can it corrupt the files itself without there actually being disc errors?

Absolutely! Any "inelegant" shutdowns or crashes can cause corruption.

Run a chkdsk as well!

 

[Tech Junky]

@Ronstang

Well that sucks. There are ways around it though. As long as there's no transcoding going on splicing off the function to a lower tier device would work for media. I used to mess with several devices until a few years back I rolled all of them into a single box setup.

Router / AP / DVR / OTA - Plex / NAS / etc.

More recently though I swapped the guts out from Intel to AMD due an issue with a new approach to storage that killed 2 x $1K+ drives for some reason. Needless to say I get the frustration / learning part. It's part of life though and how we grow.

I have the same issue with a couple of apps that refuse to work in Linux which prevent me from ditching MSFT completely. I could run Linux as primary and put MSFT in timeout through a VM that only gets fired up as needed though. I've done this in the past daily for work PC setups.

If windows crashes can it corrupt the files itself without there actually being disc errors?

Are you surprised? A crash in of itself is a problem that causes data damage if it's being written while crashing. Anything I deem important doesn't get saved on the same drive as Windows. My default DL's are sent to my server setup vs the local laptop. I forcefully rip out Windows apps using Linux to prevent them from messing up my day by crashing or pushing updates. Windows is just something we have to put up with because devs and companies won't make an open source version for *nix users. Which is kind of funny since all of those devs usually don't use Windows.

 

[Ronstang]

Absolutely! Any "inelegant" shutdowns or crashes can cause corruption.

Awesome, Windows is a self destructive POS.......now, I need to figure out why it was having issues. I have had to manually stop a lot of processes lately....mostly Edge because it takes over my entire machine bringing it to it's knees. Maybe that caused it. Edge needs to die, it is a useless data pirate.

 

[Ronstang]

Anyone have a script or something that can be ran from an icon on the desktop to run SFC automatically with the right level of access so I can just run this once a day when I get up in the morning. It appears Windows takes a crap a lot but doesn't flush like a lazy child.

 

[WelshBloke]

Anyone have a script or something that can be ran from an icon on the desktop to run SFC automatically with the right level of access so I can just run this once a day when I get up in the morning. It appears Windows takes a crap a lot but doesn't flush like a lazy child.

Honestly if you need to run SFC manually every day it would be better finding out what's corrupting everything everyday! If that's happening somethings going to stop working soon!

 

[Ronstang]

Linux is your friend for OTA or Cable. Much more stable once it's up and running

I have 5 Ceton IniniTV cards, one 6 tuner and 4 Quad tuners. I am only using 2 but they currently have no native support in emby so I have to run a proxy to make it appear as an HDHomeRun....and that software is Windows only so it doesn't matter how great linux is at capture my equipment won't run.

 

[Ronstang]

Honestly if you need to run SFC manually every day it would be better finding out what's corrupting everything everyday! If that's happening somethings going to stop working soon!

I'm not saying I need it everyday, just joking....but it would be handy to have an icon to try this when the system is acting janky

 

[WelshBloke]

I'm not saying I need it everyday, just joking....but it would be handy to have an icon to try this when the system is acting janky

Just write the commands in a text editor and save it as a .bat

 

[BadThad]

This could potentially be a hardware issue regardless of the age of the PC. The first thing to do is verify all the hardware is good. Generally, my first step is to RESEAT everything - don't just check if any connector is tight, pull it all the off and back on - ALL OF THEM/EVERYTHING. Remove all add-on and extra devices too - then test.

What are the hardware specifications?

 

[Ronstang]

I'm fairly confident this is a program hogging resources that don't seem to show up on the Task Manager. I use FFmpeg Batch AV Converter almost constantly and it seems to be Multi-File encoding that is the culprit. My video card supports 5 encoding streams but strangely using more doesn't make things go faster....it just seems to bring the system to it's knees.

The FPS of the encoding is almost identical whether I do one encoding at a time or 4 which means it is not faster to do more than one but it seems to affect the rest of the system in an adverse way. I use paint.net a lot to touch up movie posters and when I run more than 2 encoding streams at once it is constantly not responding, but when I run only 1 I have no issues as of yet but the overall encoding speed isn't any different. Go figure.

 

[videobruce]

Just another reason I'm sticking with W7 pro. But mostly because of the bloat!

 

[lantis3]

Use trimmed down Windows like Ghost Spectre?

or see if Process Explorer gives you some clue.

Process Explorer - Sysinternals

Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more.

learn.microsoft.com

 

[Ronstang]

Use trimmed down Windows like Ghost Spectre?

I have enough troubles with Win 11 I'm not interested in adding more. There are way too many integrated things in modern MS OSes to mess with stuff like that. Thanks for the input. Process Explorer is cool and once again showed MS Edge being the biggest culprit in resource stealing so I killed all those processes with no ill affect. I wish there was a way to turn this garbage OFF. I can't see how this is not an anti trust issue just like IE back in the day.....we should be able to choose any browser for the tasks Win 11 needs from a browser....but MS is more interested in stealing out data.

 

[lantis3]

The reason I suggest Ghost Spectre is because it removes Edge as default browser and Edge will not be installed. You only install the browsers you want via author's toolbox.

You can create a partition or use another drive to install Ghost Spectre and test it for a while see if it can solve the problem, you don't have to replace the existing Win11 installation from the get go.

==

Or create your own Win11 (Edge also removed)

You can dual/triple boot as long as you want.

 

[Ronstang]

You can create a partition or use another drive to install Ghost Spectre and test it for a while see if it can solve the problem, you don't have to replace the existing Win11 installation from the get go.

I may try it....but I would just install it normal. This machine does 2 things, it's my sharing emby server and I use it to do things to get my media ready to be in emby so a fresh install is fairly straight forwards since I do have software config and database files that need to be preserved but I am used to dealing with these and know where they all are. I need to create some kind of a periodic back up scheme for these files with a quick way to copy them back to their proper folders so a fresh install would take minutes.