Windows 7 file system question

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Buck268

Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
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I was wondering if anybody on here knows of a way to increase the speed at which a folder will load up all its files in explorer. Basically whats going on is my music folder takes about 2 minutes (maybe less) to fully load, so if I want to search for a particular song or album it can be really annoying. I'm pretty sure indexing is turned on and I defrag regularly. Any tips for reducing the load time on this folder?

Thanks!
 
to my knowledge, there is no way to enhance the performance of explorer. Large folders can just take a long time to load up.

Have you thought about using a jukebox program like iTunes to catalog your music?

The best way to get things to load faster, is to make sure you have a fast hard drive, plenty of ram, and a decent CPU.
 
Haven't considered it- don't much feel like learning a new program right now. I use pandora mostly, but try to change up my in-car usb drive frequently which is when this gets annoying.
 
How many items in the folder?

If you have, say, ten thousand items in there, you'll have an easier time if you split them into different folders: by artist, or by alphabet, or whatever.

Also check that you've turned off whatever kind of magic Explorer does when it sees an MP3 (e.g., showing you the title and the artist) — that requires looking in the file, which takes time.
 
Buck268 said:
Haven't considered it- don't much feel like learning a new program right now. I use pandora mostly, but try to change up my in-car usb drive frequently which is when this gets annoying.
Click to expand...

Is your music on a USB drive? If so, that's why it's so slow, not because of Windows. The only thing that could make it faster would be to get a new drive with faster data transfer speeds.
 
Planterz said:
Is your music on a USB drive? If so, that's why it's so slow, not because of Windows. The only thing that could make it faster would be to get a new drive with faster data transfer speeds.
Click to expand...

Windows 7 is slow when I look at my photo albums. Every time I open an album (with around 100 to 150 pictures in it), it takes 15 or 20 seconds to refresh all the thumbnails. I do have the thumbnails set to their maximum size, which may slow things down.
 
holygoat said:
How many items in the folder?

If you have, say, ten thousand items in there, you'll have an easier time if you split them into different folders: by artist, or by alphabet, or whatever.

Also check that you've turned off whatever kind of magic Explorer does when it sees an MP3 (e.g., showing you the title and the artist) — that requires looking in the file, which takes time.
Click to expand...

To turn off the magic

Right click the folder, click properties
Go to the Customize tab
Select General Items from the "Optimize this folder for" dropdown list
Click Apply

You will loose the ability to view the song info in explorer without viewing the properties of an individual file, so this may not be the best solution
 
Do you have enough memory? Is your HDD really old and slow or remote (as in a NAS drive)?
 
OT but useful info. People using WinXP and newer Western Digital hard disks might have one with a screwball problem. There's a utility program you can download from WD that'll fix the problem.

Info and download links here:

http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs...vanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/

"Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. By default, Windows XP creates a primary disk partition at LBA (logical block address) 63, which is one block short of being evenly divisible by eight. As a result of this offset, data is written across both sides of the 4K physical sector boundary. Read speeds and sequential write speeds aren't as badly impacted by the offset, but the impact on small and random writes is murderous."
 
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You should provide more information about type of drive and cpu/ram.

I have 23+ gigs of music, and it pops up instantly.
 
brinstar said:
To turn off the magic

Right click the folder, click properties
Go to the Customize tab
Select General Items from the "Optimize this folder for" dropdown list
Click Apply

You will loose the ability to view the song info in explorer without viewing the properties of an individual file, so this may not be the best solution
Click to expand...


Well, that did the trick. Its too bad it can't store a cache of the file 'index' for the folder and only refresh if changes were made.

RevDevil, why would disabling indexing help? I thought that only used cycles when the CPU was idle?
 
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