Windows Explorer question - Windows 7

Factual Questions
1

I have two folders with thousands of graphic images. One has 6000 and the other 9000 files. When I open those folders a progress bar slowly creeps across the top of the menu. This takes 2 or 3 minutes. What is it doing? I prefer to keep those folders sorted by date with the newest files listed first so I can quickly find them.

Windows 7 does not save that view of the files, every time I open that folder it is sorted alphabetically. So when it is done doing whatever it is doing I click on the sort column to select by date and the slow progress bar starts all over again.

Is this something to do with indexing the files, perhaps? Whatever that means. The largest folder I have after those two has 700 files and does not do this.

Also, in Win XP I could search folders by two fields at once, one in the file name and the other in “any word in the file”. That was very helpful but does not seem to be available anymore?

Dennis

2

What view option do you have? Maybe this folder is showing thumbnails and that is slowing things down.

3

Yes, if you have it as thumbnails, the OS has to open every one of those several thousand files, generate a thumbnail version of it, and display that on your page – that’s going to take some time. And if you change the sort option, it has to do it over again in your new sort order.

Change it to view list or details and see if it isn’t much faster.

4

I think I got it. I right clicked on properties and under the dialogue for “optimize folder for” I changed it to general files instead of images. Of course they *are *images but it seems to do the trick. Now it saves the view and the order and doesn’t do all that whatever it was doing before. And I can have it show thumbnails if I want, that does not slow it down.

Dennis