Slow Windows Explorer on Windows 7
- by MadBoy
I have Laptop with i7 (4 cores), 8GB ram and SSD OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS which in testing that I did just now does 400mb/s+ read/write. However the responsiveness of Windows Explorer is far from being perfect. Opening up Computer, Documents, going into folders is very slow (1-5seconds).
I don't have any viruses or spyware and I have tried changing properties to optimize view for General Items. I tried disabling Search Indexer but it made search in Outlook 2010 crawl and didn't bring any other effect. Even double clicking on file takes some time to open things up (like clicking a Word document).
I don't have any drives mapped, my computer is not joined to domain. I have multiple VPN connections that I connect to but they all have disabled default gateways. I tried using CC Cleaner or some Windows 7 Tweaks app to disable some things.
I am power user using Visual Studio, Tortoise SVN and other developer/administration apps. Any non obvious ideas?
Edit: So I've been trying to pinpoint where the issue comes from and it seems that straight after reboot Windows Explorer opens very fast, when I load 3-4 programs (Royal TS, Visual Studio, Outlook) it's noticeably slower and the more programs I have it gets worse. After I start closing programs it starts working better and if I leave 2 open it's fast again. I tried doing some research with DiskMon and other programs from sysinternals but couldn't find anything suspicious.
Below are stats during normal usage with a lots of programs open:
- Ram usage with a lot of programs open and no swap file (i disabled it for testing): 6.95GB
- CPU usage: 15%, none of the cores takes more then 50% (I have VS 2010 open x 4)
HD Tune Pro: OCZ-VERTEX3 MI Benchmark
Test capacity: full
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 363.9 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 505.5 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average :
Access Time :
Burst Rate :
CPU Usage :
HD Tune Pro: OCZ-VERTEX3 MI File Benchmark
Drive C:
Transfer rate test
File Size: 500 MB
Sequential read 484102 KB/s
Sequential write 444714 KB/s
Random read 7779 IOPS
Random write 16888 IOPS
Random read (queue depth = 32) 73007 IOPS
Random write (queue depth = 32) 69790 IOPS
HD Tune Pro: OCZ-VERTEX3 MI Random Access
Test capacity: full
Read test
Transfer size operations / sec avg. access time max. access time avg. speed
512 bytes 3260 IOPS 0.306 ms 2.106 ms 1.592 MB/s
4 KB 4161 IOPS 0.240 ms 2.006 ms 16.256 MB/s
64 KB 2382 IOPS 0.419 ms 2.367 ms 148.934 MB/s
1 MB 449 IOPS 2.225 ms 4.197 ms 449.407 MB/s
Random 809 IOPS 1.235 ms 6.551 ms 410.527 MB/s
HD Tune Pro: OCZ-VERTEX3 MI Extra Tests
Test capacity: full
Random seek 3975 IOPS 0.252 ms 1.941 MB/s
Random seek 4 KB 4245 IOPS 0.236 ms 16.583 MB/s
Butterfly seek 4086 IOPS 0.245 ms 1.995 MB/s
Random seek / size 64 KB 3812 IOPS 0.262 ms 58.606 MB/s
Random seek / size 8 MB 120 IOPS 8.348 ms 485.737 MB/s
Sequential outer 4524 IOPS 0.221 ms 282.721 MB/s
Sequential middle 4429 IOPS 0.226 ms 276.818 MB/s
Sequential inner 5504 IOPS 0.182 ms 344.000 MB/s
Burst rate 4472 IOPS 0.224 ms 279.475 MB/s
