Lag/Delay in Explorer when Renaming Copying Creating Files

jaib9990

New Member
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19
I have been noticing randomly delay or lag in my Windows Explorer whenever I do operations such as create new folder or files, copy/paste files, or rename files.

By lag, what I mean is that lets say I rename a file from "File A" to File B", I don't see the change in the file name instantaneously. It takes few seconds I have to press F5 to refresh the window to actually see the changes.


I am running on Windows 8.1
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8
I joined the forum to bring up the same complaint.

I 'upgraded' last week, from Win 7 HP sp1(different laptop) and from win 8 to 8.1 (this laptop via Windows Store).

Superfetch and indexing are not turned off. Accessing files in various devices seem to take forever compared to win 7.

Yesterday, I spent some time using the file explorer to rename and organize files on an external hard drive. Soon enough, the system came grinding to a slow crawl. Bringing up task manager took 'forever'. Eventually, it showed the explorer utilizing over 2GB of memory (6GB total in system). After closing the explorer window, the memory was not released. I had to restart explorer.exe to release the memory. Once I replicated the event, I began to wonder if this is unique to my machine or inherent in the OS.

I generally use XNView as my file manager. But, it wasn't performing as well as it should, or as well as it had been with Win 7. That's why I tried to bypass the middle man in XNView.

With Win 7, the external devices spin down after time has passed. There would always be lag while the accessed device spin up. With Win 8.1, the spin down seemed to be next to no time passing. I spend 5 to 10 seconds being careful in what I'm doing with the files, I have to deal with the lag before the action takes effect.

In summary, there is the explorer 'memory leak?' and the quick spin down of external devices, both affecting the performance of the file explorer.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win 8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
I searched microsoft.com and came up with these two links:

Windows 8.1 Explorer.exe Memory Leak! - Microsoft Community

Windows8.1 explorer.exe memory leak when used with 'sort by - Microsoft Community

The first one turned out to be pertinent (maybe). I mentioned XNView earlier, and the program introduced a context menu handler .dll several iterations ago. I never put the file explorer.exe through its paces until last week, with Win 8.1.

Once I used CCleaner to disable that .dll, I put the explorer through some file management activities and the memory it uses hardly budged.

I included the second link in case there is a file organization issue at play. I try to keep my folder names closest to root as short as possible.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win 8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
That didn't really help me. I am still having the issue. I believe your problem and my problem are two different issues.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8
The symtom you've described might be due to some incompatible 3rd party software installed in your PC. To isolate the problem, let's try:
  1. Win+R->msconfig then click on the "services" tab, put a check mark on "Hide all non Microsoft services" and click on "Disable all"
  2. Open task manager, go to "Startup" tab, for each item, right click and disable.
  3. Reboot your PC and try to see if the problem goes away. If it does then go back and re-enable one by one until you encounter the same problem.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1x64PWMC Ubuntu14.04x64 MintMate17x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Brewed
    CPU
    I7 4970K OC'ed @4.7 GHz
    Motherboard
    MSI-Z97
    Memory
    16 GB G-Skill Trident X @2400MHZ
    Graphics Card(s)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
    Sound Card
    X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dual HP-W2408
    Screen Resolution
    1920X1200
    Hard Drives
    256 GB M2 sm951, (2) 500GB 850EVO, 5TB, 2 TB Seagate
    PSU
    Antec 850W
    Case
    Antec 1200
    Cooling
    Danger Den H20
    Keyboard
    Logitech
    Mouse
    Logitech Performance Mouse MX
    Internet Speed
    35/12mbps
    Browser
    Firefox
The symtom you've described might be due to some incompatible 3rd party software installed in your PC. To isolate the problem, let's try:
  1. Win+R->msconfig then click on the "services" tab, put a check mark on "Hide all non Microsoft services" and click on "Disable all"
  2. Open task manager, go to "Startup" tab, for each item, right click and disable.
  3. Reboot your PC and try to see if the problem goes away. If it does then go back and re-enable one by one until you encounter the same problem.

I tried all the steps and it didn't seem to fix the problem. However, one note is that I didn't disable my antivirus (ESET Nod32).
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8
Hey, i don't know if this is related but i've been having issues with lag and explorer as well.. my downloads folder waits like 4 seconds or more before showing the files.. have you seen that before too?

waiting for folder.JPG
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 (HOME not Pro) 64bit
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    (So not very nice) Lenovo Y410P
    CPU
    i7 quad 2.4Gig
    Memory
    16G ram
    Graphics Card(s)
    nvidia 2gig 755m
    Hard Drives
    Samsung 840 Evo

    supercache2 m2. mini card.
    Antivirus
    Win Defender

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1x64PWMC Ubuntu14.04x64 MintMate17x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Brewed
    CPU
    I7 4970K OC'ed @4.7 GHz
    Motherboard
    MSI-Z97
    Memory
    16 GB G-Skill Trident X @2400MHZ
    Graphics Card(s)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
    Sound Card
    X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dual HP-W2408
    Screen Resolution
    1920X1200
    Hard Drives
    256 GB M2 sm951, (2) 500GB 850EVO, 5TB, 2 TB Seagate
    PSU
    Antec 850W
    Case
    Antec 1200
    Cooling
    Danger Den H20
    Keyboard
    Logitech
    Mouse
    Logitech Performance Mouse MX
    Internet Speed
    35/12mbps
    Browser
    Firefox
Also try the link below, it's for the right click but also apply to other things with explorer:
http://www.eightforums.com/performa...ick-menu-lag-my-pc-post187343.html#post187343

It seems none of the third party softwares are causing the issue. I disabled all and restarted explorer with fixed my explorer lag/delay issue. None of the software caused the issue again when enabling them one by one.

I restarted the computer, and noticed the explorer lag/delay issue again. So I used ShellExView, but this time, I just restarted explorer but didn't disable any softwares. Restarting fixed the issue.

The issue randomly starts again and restarting the explorer only temporarily fixes the problem.

I am unsure what is causing this problem...
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8
I tried all the steps and it didn't seem to fix the problem. However, one note is that I didn't disable my antivirus (ESET Nod32).

Temporarily disable Nod32 and use the PC for a while to see if the problem goes away.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1x64PWMC Ubuntu14.04x64 MintMate17x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Brewed
    CPU
    I7 4970K OC'ed @4.7 GHz
    Motherboard
    MSI-Z97
    Memory
    16 GB G-Skill Trident X @2400MHZ
    Graphics Card(s)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
    Sound Card
    X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dual HP-W2408
    Screen Resolution
    1920X1200
    Hard Drives
    256 GB M2 sm951, (2) 500GB 850EVO, 5TB, 2 TB Seagate
    PSU
    Antec 850W
    Case
    Antec 1200
    Cooling
    Danger Den H20
    Keyboard
    Logitech
    Mouse
    Logitech Performance Mouse MX
    Internet Speed
    35/12mbps
    Browser
    Firefox
For me the culprit was windows defender. You can see the spike in CPU. Renaming two files causes it to delay. I made the decision to turn windows defender off. I no longer have that lag.

Search feature put in win def
window defender icon should appear
click to open
go to settings and uncheck "turn on this app"
save changes

The only reason I had this problem because I believed what windows says about doing a refresh. It saves files in your document and any original window or approved 3rd party programs. Any self installed programs are lost and you will have to start over. Thank you again for telling me that to late. So beware the refresh unless your desperate.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows 8
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
[FONT=&quot]" have run into this particular behavior. The delay stems from Windows Explorer spending time generating media thumbnail previews in the background.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]To reproduce this issue:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
  • Open Task Manager so you can monitor your CPU usage.
  • Open Windows Explorer and navigate to a folder of media where no thumbnails have been generated yet.
  • Try to delete a file. Watch as Windows takes 30 seconds to several minutes to "discover items" before prompting you to confirm deletion. During this process, notice how Task Manager shows high or maximum CPU usage dedicated to Windows explorer and a dllhost child process.
  • Allow Windows to finish it's thumbnailing process so the CPU settles to idle. After that, try to delete a media file again. Notice how the delete confirmation dialog appears immediately this time.
This was an issue all the way back in Windows 98 for image files. The issue was corrected for 2000/XP. Looks like Microsoft let this particular bug regress its way back in. Way to go, guys!"

-Try this. [/FONT]
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Jellybean
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