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On my Windows 7 machine, the Programs and Features control panel page takes 3 and a half minutes to fully populate (it varies, but that is one example).

Initially the large majority of installed apps are shown, and then over the remaining period, further apps trickle in, while the progress bar creeps to the end. During this process, column sorting doesn't work.

Has anyone else got this problem? Is there a known fix?

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It's not broken. The column-sorting behaviour is by design. Your machine may need some performance optimisation (disk / registry defrag, more RAM) to populate this list quicker. – Randolph West Sep 29 '10 at 16:14
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They deliberately designed the column sorting behaviour to not work until you wait 3 and a half minutes? Yeah, yeah I know what you mean - they assumed it would take a short time to populate the dialog, so didn't bother implementing sorting-during-populate. I totally disagree that 'it's not broken' by the way. 3 and a half minutes before the dialog is usable - 'not broken'? – mackenir Sep 30 '10 at 9:53
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3 Answers

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Turn off the Size column. If you right click the Size column and turn it off, the list will populate just about instantly. For full speed, show only the Name, Publisher, Installed On and Version columns. Once you verified it opens instantly, add back columns that you want and then you can see which columns are the slow ones.

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Although... this might not be the problem either. Turning off the size column seemed to work for a while, but now I find it is just as slow as before... – Ross Bradbury Jul 7 '11 at 16:27
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This has been a problem since the XP days. Part of what it is doing is calculating disk space to fill in the 'Size' column.

If you are willing to try an alternative program, there are a bunch that will allow you to quickly view installed programs (without calculating size) and then run the uninstaller:

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Amazing. This certainly sounds plausible (that it's doing some work). Also, it may cache this somewhere, because sometimes the dialog populates more quickly. Deary deary me... – mackenir Sep 30 '10 at 9:52
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How many items do you have in the list? I'd suggest removing any unnecessary software.

How old is the computer? You may need more RAM, a faster processor, faster disk. I'd suggest a minimum of 2GB of RAM for Windows 7, an Intel Core 2 Duo or better, and ideally a solid state disk (SSD) for the absolute best performance.

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An SSD shouldn't materially affect the speed with which the Control Panel populates the Programs and Features list, though, since it isn't disk-limited. I woudl expect RAM to be limiting factor there. – CarlF Sep 29 '10 at 16:40
@CarlF: Are you saying that Win7 doesn't read the disk to get the icon? I would have assumed it would need to seek to the program file to get the icon resource embedded there. – hotei Sep 29 '10 at 17:11
Yes, of course it reads the icon from the disk, but I can't imagine that it's the bottleneck on any system that's new enough to run IE. Modern rotating drives are very fast and icons are tiny. It's not as if Windows is reading tens of thousands of icon files. – CarlF Sep 29 '10 at 19:02
It's a relatively new laptop with an SSD. – mackenir Sep 30 '10 at 9:51
Did you do a fresh installation of Windows 7 on this machine, or is it a default installation that came on it? I'd suggest starting with a fresh install. – Trevor Sullivan Oct 1 '10 at 20:40
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