Having some trouble with my laptop it 's not in front of me, so apologies for the lack of exac...

[G+_Ben Yanke]

Having some trouble with my laptop...it's not in front of me, so apologies for the lack of exact specs, but needless to say, it's more than enough.

 

It's a lenovo thinkpad, running an intel i7 or i9, 12 GB of ram, and a 512gb ssd as the main system drive, as well as a spinning HDD as a secondary drive (hooked up where the CD drive used to be).

 

Overall, it's quite fast, between the processor and the SSD, it boots up in a flash, loads Photoshop or premiere in the time most computers open paint, and overall, runs well.

 

But multiple times a day, windows explorer lags like crazy (and has since I got it a few months ago). I'll right click a file and it will take 8 seconds to rename a 20kb text file, for example. Not every time, but at least several times a day.

 

Ideas?

[G+_610GARAGE]

Is reformating a possibility? Is the laggy file always on the spinning disk or ssd, or is it both? The file that causes the lag could be due to minor corruption, or fragmentation. Running Spinrite on the spinning disk probably would be a good idea too.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

I don't recall, but it appears to be on both.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

Spinrite is a good idea! Doh! Why didn't I think of that!

[G+_Steve C]

If the drives check out OK then it's probably got some app loading down the processor by running it at 100%.  I'd turn off automatic updates then keep Task Manager open and shrunk down on the task bar so you can just see the CPU Utilization and next time it does that open it and see what process is taking 100% of the CPU time.

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

I've seen this behavior. Any chance you can disable the webcam? -- I know... sounds silly... but try it. Disable the webcam in computer manager and kill any processes related to the web cam.

[G+_Jerry Ham]

Another thing to check for is Explorer add-ins. These are things that typically add to the right-click context menu in Explorer and some of them manage to activate and check things when the context menu is opened. Things like Zip managers, Antivirus, and others add to the context menu. You might test that by not right-clicking to rename the file but instead press the function key equivalent. In your case of renaming a file - select the file and then press F2. If you don't get the hang when doing this all day, then you likely have something that has added itself to the right-click context menu that is spinning cycles (looking for a network connection or something)  and causing your delay.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

Steve C Wayne Hobbins laptop is new (within a few months) and running win7. Nothing is running the processor at 100%, it's simply explorer lagging when I do very specific things like file renames and sometimes loads, not a general computer lag. Overall, the computer is very snappy.

 

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ I'll try that after work! Thanks for the odd tip, Father!

[G+_Steve C]

Have you tried running Decrapifier on it to remove all the demo and trial versions of anti-virus programs and everything like that?  I dunno if Thinkpads come with lots of crap that needs to be removed but Dells do and Decrapifier was written for that but works on HP, Thinkpads and others too. 

[G+_Ben Reese]

I've got a similar issue sometimes at work - not always though and not very often. If you open task manager to the processes tab then sort descending by CPU you're heaviest application will move to the top (sometimes memory is a better indicator of what's slowing things down if your CPU isn't being taxed). I've had Windows Explorer use 50+% (seldom does anything actually use 100%) and killing that process frees the system up again. If you kill Explorer.exe your start menu will go away and you'll likely lose a couple of open windows too. You can restart Explorer with File->New Task (Run...)->"explorer.exe". If you've got 12 GB of RAM, it's not likely that RAM is the issue.

 

If memory is being eaten up by something (typically Chrome for me but sometimes a svchost.exe) you can consider killing that as well. Just be warned that if you don't know what it is you may kill Windows and have to reboot.

If svchost.exe is killing resources, I've noticed that it's usually the Windows Update service (thus the suggestion by Steve C). I wouldn't suggest completely disabling Windows Update, but I do occasionally restart the service to get my resources back (Run->"services.msc", right-click Windows Update -> Restart).

 

Can you tell what's eating away at your machine?

[G+_Ben Reese]

I also like the disable Webcam idea and will definitely have to try that next time if that affects Windows Explorer.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Yeah, I'd turn it off just for testing. Jokes on them when it comes back on!

[G+_Timothy Hamlett]

Wayne Hobbins lol