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I have a 500GB WD hard drive (internal) that I use to store my multimedia. For some reason, it is slow on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I had it in the same hardware configuration running XP Pro 64-bit and it was lightning quick. Now I constantly have to wait for folders to load. For instance, I will drill a few levels down and get to a particular song artist. I double click on one of the albums to open it, and it can take up to seven seconds to give me the list of files in it (20 songs at most). It's ridiculous. And then sometimes when I open a song I have to the songs in the album play right away). What can I do to fix this?!

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  • Is it only slow in the music folders?
    – user3463
    Mar 13, 2011 at 1:21
  • @Randolph No, every folder, every file type Mar 13, 2011 at 4:45
  • If your hard driver is full or the partition that you install windows 7 is full the then the OS tend to slow down. Because windows 7 need at least 2GB free space on the hard disk for it to operate properly. Otherwise the machine will get slower and slower.
    – Laky
    Mar 13, 2011 at 13:29
  • There are services you can tweak but it will never be as fast as on XP.
    – Overmind
    Mar 24, 2017 at 9:03

3 Answers 3

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I'd suggest 2 things:

1) Turn off Windows indexing service.

2) Don't let hard drives "go to sleep" in your power settings.

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If you upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, you'll want to make sure you have enough RAM -- although Windows XP can work quite happily with 2 GBs, Windows 7 (and Windows Vista) work better with 4 GBs of RAM (I prefer 8 GBs but 4 GBs is generally okay).

If the hard drive itself has slowed down, there's always the possibility of bad sectors developing too, and with the recent installation of Windows 7 there is the intensity of the installation process that can push a soon-to-fail hard drive significantly closer to it's final days. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE FULL BACKUPS (and test your backups because if you can't restore, your backup is useless)!

Also, how many files are in the directory that's slow? If you have thousands (or more, which is common with MP3 music collections that aren't categorized into sub-directories), then the file system may be slowing things down (even with indexing, it can still be slow, especially if the application accessing it is doing manual filtering/sorting).

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  • I have 8GB of RAM! I keep sufficient backups, and the hard drive is defragged and checked for errors weekly. It was an excellent drive before changing operating systems. And as mentioned in the question, it is slow even on directories with 10 files. Mar 13, 2011 at 5:02
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Sounds like its wasting time loading ID3 tag/metadata information from the files.

Another answer that may work is since they're media files, make sure those folders are displayed as General Items, and not as "music files."

1) right click on any blank white space in your media folder. Select Customize this folder..

2) Select General Items and check the box that says apply to subfolders

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