Windows Folders Taking Ages to Open

For the past few months some of my Windows folders have started to take a while to open in Explorer. A great example of this is the Download folder, whenever I click it in the navigation list on the left I get a scrolling screen bar in the navigation area and it can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 2 minutes to load.

My first thought was that its progressive downward spiral in performance was due to its increase in size over time, its a download folder so that kinda makes sense right? First I disabled my Anti-virus and gave it another try, no joy.

I then started experimenting with different folders and discovered that if you open a folder, right click on the white space inside the folder and open properties there is a Customize tab.

Folder Properties - Customize Tab
Folder Properties – Customize Tab

 

In this is a drop down with a selection of different folder types to optimize the folder for, in my case it had defaulted to Pictures which was probably causing Windows to try and generate thumbnails or show images for loads of 1GB+ files. Once I changed this to “General Items” the load time returned to normal and I can now open my Download and other folders in seconds!

Feel free to leave a comment if this helped or you found other fixes for this.

Read More

Windows 7 SFC Errors in Recovery Console CLI

So I decided to fire up the desktop machine today and it went straight into a blue screen,  its running Windows 7 so I decided to reboot and load up the Recovery Console by pressing F8 as the PC was loading to try and run the system file checker (SFC).

What happened next was a little odd and looking around the net it isn’t particularly well documented, its out there in bits and bobs but I thought it might be helpful to tie it all together in one place.

So the scenario here is that I’ve loaded the recovery console and chosen to go into the command line, my end game is that I want to run the SFC.

So your first step might be to run;

X:\sfc /SCANNOW

If you’re hitting the same issues as me there are two things you should notice at this point, firstly that the command prompt is set to some random hard drive letter. Secondly that it throws this error when you try to run that command;

There is a system repair pending which requires reboot to complete. Restart windows and run SFC again

In my case its because the X drive is just where the recovery partition has been mounted, obviously its not the boot partition. Next you might try the following command;

X:\sfc /SCANNOW /OFFBOOTDIR=C:\ /OFFWINDIR=C:\Windows

It seems reasonable to assume that this would force SFC to run on the C drive, however you may get this error;

Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service

Well, thats actually because you’re assuming that the recovery console has mounted the boot drive onto the same drive letter that you normally use, in fact its probably put it somewhere else, to find out you can just run the next command.

X:\bcdedit | find "osdevice"

Nice and simple, this will return where the OS is installed, in my case it returned the following.

osdevice            partition=E:

So now I know where my partition is hiding I can re-run the SFC command above with the correct detail and this time you should find it runs successfully 🙂 Hope this helps someone!

x:\sfc /SCANNOW /OFFBOOTDIR=E:\ /OFFWINDIR=E:\Windows

Read More