[Klaustrophobia]

I've been googling this for a while to no avail, so I figure there's a halfway decent shot of someone here knowing what to do.  I've got a rather sizable (211 GB) folder of videos that is giving me fits with how slow it responds and how it hangs all the time.  The most popular suggestion on google was to turn the folder optimization from 'video' to 'general items' but all that seems to do is change the default icon layout, and when I switch back from detailed or small icon view, it's still just as slow.  I'm almost certain the underlying problem is that windows refreshes the thumbnail for each and every file every time the folder is opened, or at the very least as I scroll down the folder.  It doesn't need to refresh those every time, they don't change.  I found a "fix" that was supposed to turn on thumbnail caching, but it didn't change anything.  They still refresh every time, windows never builds a thumbs.db file.  Anyone know how to turn this on properly?  I'd really rather not turn off thumbnails altogether if I don't have to.  Hell, I haven't even found how to do that without just shrinking to tiny icons/details view (which drives me nuts).

Microsoft, why you fix things that don't broke?   

[BloodEagle]

I could have sworn thumbnail caching  was enabled by default....  In which case, it comes down to how powerful your machine is.

If you have to load thumbnails for 1000+ videos, then it's going to be slow-ish, even coming from the cache.

[Klaustrophobia]

funny thing is, there is another folder on the same external drive that's even bigger, but it doesn't hang like this.  it behaves more like i would expect loading thumbs from a db to, where it barely hitches as new files are scrolled to and the thumb loads.  in the other one, ones that are already displaying will clear and refresh, some stay with the opening program icon, and some are just plain blank.  file name underneath white space.  maybe this is residual effect from the fact this drive corrupted about half the files when i did the initial transfer.

[Scourge of Ages]

It's not really a "fix" as such, but if you sorted the videos into sub-folders that might help.

[Klaustrophobia]

yeah that's what i've started to do.  don't like it, but it seems to be the best option i can find.  i'd rather have them all in one list i can browse through.

[Nuke]

view the folder from the command line

*runs*

[jr2]

Is there perhaps excessive fragmentation in the files in that folder?  You could try Contig + PowerDefrag (contig frontend, contig is CLI) and defrag just that folder.

[Davros]

I have something similar when I open my games folder, it takes a while to load all the icons for the shortcuts
back in the xp days i put all the icons into a library (icl file) but win 7 doesnt support icl files

[Nuke]

Is there perhaps excessive fragmentation in the files in that folder?  You could try Contig + PowerDefrag (contig frontend, contig is CLI) and defrag just that folder.

lol, i havent used a defrag utility in at least 10 years (probibly because i kill fragmentation with format c:\).

[Scourge of Ages]

lol, i havent used a defrag utility in at least 10 years (probibly because i kill fragmentation with format c:\).

It's the only way to be sure.