Windows 7 Green-Bar-of-slowness. (why do simple tasks like sorting a folder by size or name take so long?)

Question

In older versions of windows you'd click on the filename column heading and wop - the files are sorted by name. Click on size, bif - they're sorted by size.

In windows 7 do the same thing and you get to watch a green bar slowly get bigger... slowly.

Did I mention that it's slow?

How can a simple task like visually sorting a folder take so long in Microsoft's newest most sophisticated OS?

Answer 1

I found the answer elsewhere, although it still begs the question of how windows can be so slow sorting folders 'optimized' for video or pictures. The answer is as follows...

Drill down to the folder then right-click on it and click the Customize tab and make sure the default setting of "General Items" is set. If already set to General, try one of the other settings.

http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/35758-explorer-slow-sort-folders-files.html

Answer 2

Struggling for months with this issue I wondered what Microsoft thought to be helpfull with this option. Why make things easy if you can frustrate millions and have fun selling software to solve it?

Well, this answer set me off in a direction of, which I found to have solved the problem ! My folders open fast as a fury now and even rightclicking on them opens the properties in a blink of an eye. Beleive it or not. Here an contribution from a Dutchy. Advanced user, but no pro at all! This is what I did; I disabled a lot of the Indexing locations (we still want to index, huh, don't we?) Go to Control Panel and open Indexing Services. Untick all useless indexing locations. (you can go in detail by pointing at the small triangular arrow and go deeper in the system. Keep only the Windows user and Program files. Use your common sense when picking what to disable and what not, I can not list them all here for you.

This helped me a great deal and solved the problem for me. If you have success too, please tell others on all the fora about this issue. If success, drop me a line, we'll discuss my fee afterwards ;-)

Hope this will help the world working Windows 7

Answer 3

Drove me nuts too, but then I realized if you take the pictures out of your "library" then the folder is not indexed. Libraries are used to create an index like a card catalog in a real library.

Answer 4

I just got completely fed up and since nothing else worked, I just terminate the SearchIndexer.exe process and it works fine. Microsoft you sure screwed up the indexing service on Windows 7.

Answer 5

I got the solution here:

1. Right-click on the folder and select "Properties".
2. Click on "Customize" tab.
3. Under "What kind of folder do you want?" and under "Optimize this folder for:", select "General Items".
4. You are done!