I have a rather annoying issue with my Windows 7 computer whereby it seems to take ages to delete, move or copy folders, even when they are empty. The problem is intermittent, to make matters worse. It just says "Discovering items..." for anything up to a couple of minutes before eventually doing what its told.
Any suggestions on where to look to stop this happening?
I have tried disabling antivirus realtime scanning to rule that out as the root cause.
I found a huge post with LOT'S of suggestions. It could be related to many things...
First step would be to boot into Safe mode and see if the behavior is still happening. If it isn't you know it isn't Windows related but some kind of system driver (e.g. your antivirus even though you have it disabled).
Other suggestions include thumbnails, file permissions, too many files in a folder, etc... just read through the thread and try some things:
I've worked around this by moving large folders from the command-line (cmd.exe) instead:
c:\> move c:\stuff\big-folder c:\other-stuff\some-other-folder
This works very quickly for me for dirs under the same drive letter. Also, any explorer window displaying the source or destination dirs updates within a second after the command-line prompt returns.
When selecting and moving multiple items, I use dired-mode (under emacs) which works with similar speed when moving files/dirs within the same drive letter.
I had that same extremely annoying problem, where deleting empty folder would block while "discovering items".
The moment when I killed TSVNCache.exe and/or TGitCache.exe discovering was done and I didn't have that problem anymore. So, not only all that Tortoise stuff asks you to reboot your PC with every update, it also screws explorer badly.
In windows explorer go to Tools
Folder Options View Tab and check mark the first option "Always show icons, never thumbnails.
Will solve the problem. If you want to see thumbnails in the folders again, remove the check mark.
I had a similar problem in Windows XP, mostly due to messing up Registry settings. It was so bad that I couldn't access any partition other than C:/ and without going to My Computer.
How I messed up the Registry:
How I "restored" the Registry:
... but I doubt you, as a regular user, would have messed up the Registry so bad for this to happen. However, it might be a possible cause.
The problem with Windows GUI is that it tries to calculate the total volume of bytes to be copied before starting the work. While it may not be a problem while copying files within the same hard drive, it can be a major time consumer while copying files across different drives and between computers.
If you are sure that the target drive has sufficient space or don't mind if the copying gets terminated intermittently due to insufficient space, you may use following from the command prompt (cmd):
XCOPY /S /E
The above copies all files, all subdirectories, including the empty ones. It starts copying immediately without trying to discover.
Use "XCOPY /?" to see all options.
I can not help you with the movement and copying. But I got around the deleting issues with the command prompt using:
del *complete folder path*
