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I'm using Windows 8 RTM. I have about 1,100 files in a folder. When I sort by date (in either direction), The address bar shows the green progress indicator as if it's working hard to perform the sort. This should be near instant - why is it taking so long? It takes probably 2 minutes just to sort these files by date! (This was instant in Windows 7.)

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Which Date column is this exactly? As mentioned here, Date is different from Date Created/Modified/Accessed (on Win7 at least, ought to be the same in Win8 as well). It might be slow if the former column type is used and Explorer is trying to extract EXIF data from the files. Try Date Created or Date Modified instead and see if it is still as slow. (If it is, check your HDD for errors using the manufacturer's utility.)

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  • You're right. It was just "Date" - no more info there! This is in my Downloads folder but it seems that Windows may have been treating it as a folder containing images/videos/etc. and was attempting to extract the "Date" from some internal mechanism depending on the file type. Changing to "Date created" works much better. Thanks.
    – Josh M.
    Oct 15, 2012 at 0:18
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    You can also probably change the folder's template.
    – Karan
    Oct 15, 2012 at 4:22
  • Nice. It was set to Pictures - changed it back to General. Thanks for the tip.
    – Josh M.
    Oct 15, 2012 at 15:57
  • Dude you just saved me 5 minutes sorting a folder full of media files!
    – user9520
    Oct 13, 2014 at 2:26
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    This has been plaguing me for at least a year. Thank you!
    – Ben Baril
    Jul 14, 2015 at 12:52

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