explorer very slow on networked drive

[roger]

Okay, so I have a drive on a pc shared on my network. I am accessing it from my laptop using wireless G.

NET USE Z: \\computername\c /persistent:no /user:name password



if I open Z from explorer and try to drill down through directories explorer hangs with an hour glass for 5-15 seconds before it opens the folder I double clicked on. The lag may be only 3-4 seconds if there are only a few files or folders in the subdirectory. If there are around 20-30 files, the lag is more in the 10-15 second range.

It seems a *bit* faster if I switch the folder to "classic" from "show common tasks".

From a windows CMD terminal I can issue a 'dir' command and get an immediate response.

Any ideas on how to improve the performance of Explorer?


edit: both machines are running XP service pack 2

[Wudang]

There's a registry tweak that speeds up explorer on networked drives but the details are on my work PC which I can't post from.
Remember that dir is just listing the filenames while explorer is working out what applications are the default for the file etc. What if you set the view type to "list"?

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Anyway to check the speed of the wireless link? It may not be running at full throughput for all sorts of reasons.

Can you set up an ethernet cabled connection to see what you get then?

[GreNME]

My first thought is that the wireless is causing the problem. Wifi is a 'chatty' protocol, and the somewhat haphazard traffic with wifi tends to muck up file sharing, which has a lot of integrity checks and rechecks.

However, Explorer in XP does have a known problem with network drives, in that it performs way more requests than necessary when a network drive is made. The registry keys I've found that work are as follows:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Pol icies\Explorer
DWORD NoRemoteChangeNotify = 1
DWORD NoRemoteRecursiveEvents = 1

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Pol icies\Explorer
DWORD NoRemoteChangeNotify = 1
DWORD NoRemoteRecursiveEvents = 1

There's another one involving a DWORD entry called "SuppressionPolicy" but it's in the HKCR hive and I don't typically suggest fiddling around in there unless you're willing to take a risk. It's unrelated to the entries I suggested above, so try those first and see if you get results.

[roger]

Okay, the cabled connection is faster, though anything but fast. When I most need the drive I'm docked anyway, so that is good.

The registry key seemed to help a bit too. 7 seconds wireless, 3 seconds wired.

Switching from detailed view to list did not help.

I went ahead and googled the SuppressionPolicy issue and followed the instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829700 That made no difference.

The good news is that the directories that are important hold my SCM data, and those are running very fast now. The ones that are still slow hold my mp3s - not exactly a show stopper. This is my development machine, so I'm supposed to be working on this, not playing anyway.

So, thanks for the help everyone! I'll definitely take some more advice if anyone else has further ideas. A ggogle suggested desktop.ini would slow things down. I tried removing them to no avail.

[GreNME]

The desktop.ini files are just going to come back, even if you delete them.

It sounds like it's the wifi that's slowing you down most. This is the down-side of wifi, unfortunately. The communication going on with the wireless is similar to the old ethernet hubs, in that communications are broadcast in every direction until a verification of receipt is made, and this happens in both directions. There's a lot of signal-to-noise factors that are inherently slowing you down.

[Wudang]

This may be what I was thinking of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715

[roger]

This may be what I was thinking of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715
I just tried that. It didn't seem to make a difference. But I pretty much find autoplay annoying, so it was useful anyway.

[moopet]

If you have video files in the path you're browsing to, then explorer will be trying to read them to make thumbnails and probably won't understand the codec.
If that's the case, this will fix it:

REGSVR32 /U SHMEDIA.DLL

but you'll obviously lose the little preview videos in that horrible pane on the left.

[Typicallucas]

I fell ya, my computer takes about 20 seconds to "find" the networked computer in the living room when I double click it, but once it pops up I can navigate around and access files with no delay.