Explorer Extremely Slow after PC Repair

Question

I recently had my work laptop shipped off to HP to replace a faulty power supply. Since I figured this would take a while I got an unused tower lying around the office, popped the HDD out of the laptop and stuck it in my handy USB to SATA converter and continued my work. I worked directly off the laptop HDD for the entirety of the repair, with I would lots of continuous reading/writing to the drive (being a programmer, ctrl+s is a habit).

However, after getting the laptop back and replacing the HDD, anything I do in Windows Explorer is really slow. Whether it be trying to open a directory or right-click on a file for the shell menu, almost any action takes 5-60 seconds, something that should happen instantly (fairly powerful laptop). I tried defragging all my partitions, and it might have had a small effect, but explorer still hangs. Any suggestions on what would cause this would be much appreciated.

Screencast

Answer 1

Step 1 would be to check whether the HDD is configured in IDE/SATA mode. Next, I'd check for the transfer mode - Windows shifts from DMA to PIO if it encounters successive (internal) errors and even changing mode merely reflects t, doesn't change it ( and I'm speaking this from personal experience). Head over to device manage and remove/uninstall the HDD controller, and reboot, this will make Windows reload the drivers and switch to DMA mode. If you're still facing errors, use an app like SpeedFan which can perform SMART analysis on your HDD.

A virus scan using a latest updated AntiVirus can also be done to cross out virus infection related problems