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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders.

I use Keypirinha, Everything, and other tools to get work done.

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In many of those cases it's shell extensions installed by other apps that make Explorer slow. I forgot how you can check that, but you can.

“autoruns” from sysinternals

ShellExView from Nirsoft

This! Especially f'in dropbox.. swear to god everytime you try to click on a file it does some type of request to try to "help" you.

Which is fine, but it gets slow as hell. I have a brand new very fast machine and all the sudden explorer was getting so terrible. I downloaded something to disable the dropbox shell extensions and back to very nice performance.

Still it's sign of bad design IMO. Proper design would show menu immediately with some indication that some items are still loading, while running shell extension callbacks in background. But probably that's too fundamental to change at this moment. I remember entire Windows shell freezing because of similar things back in Windows XP. At least now different shell parts don't freeze all at once.

Yeah, and but there are SO many plugin systems designed decades after Explorer that do the same thing. Hindsight is 20/20.

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