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Sunday, July 17, 2011

Folder Takes Ages To Load? Try This Fix

I have one folder on my hard drive where I put all the downloads from the
Internet on; Videos, photos, documents, music, programs and basically
anything that gets downloaded. I noticed lately that it took a long time to
open that folder in Windows Explorer. Or, to be more precise, a long time
before the contents where sorted correctly in the folder. Windows Explorer
would show that loading animation in the location bar and it took a few
seconds before the files and folders were sorted properly.
I first thought it was related to the size of the contents which now occupied
247 Gigabytes of space on that hard drive. the 35k files and 485 subfolders
could also have been a problem. Deleting some old contents in that folder
did not fix the problem. I also tried switching the layout but every view mode
resulted in the same problems.
Then I thought about other programs that might cause the problem.
Antivirus software or shell extensions but none of this was the reason for the
lag that was experienced whenever I opened that folder. All other folders
opened fine but none had the size or files of that one folder.
Then I discovered the customize tab in the folder properties dialog which
finally allowed me to fix the issue that I had.
The “optimize this folder for” pulldown menu was set to Pictures although
pictures did not make up the bulk of the data. I switched that to videos,
enabled the “also apply this template to all subfolders” option and et voila,
the folder contents where being displayed immediately afterwards. I
double-checked, reverted the changes to end up with the same slow loading
folder. Applied the fix again and it was once again fast and without lag.

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