Windows XP Fury

[Raptisoft]

Hi all,

I've been having a couple of problems with WinXP for some time now, and I still haven't been able to resolve them, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows what's up. These problems persist in SP2:

1) Sometimes when I delete a file, it takes a *long* time to delete the file. It says "deleting..." and I can literally get up, get a cup of orange juice, and come back before it's finished. Anyone know what causes this? It's not every file I delete, but it happens often enough to really tick me off.

2) Whenever I preview an image by double clicking on it to open Windows Image Viewer, I'm in for another long wait. This *is* every time. It's literally faster for me to sit through the Paint Shop Pro startup dance than to double click any image-- we're talking a complete computer lockup for anywhere from 1-3 minutes. During that time, I can't switch tasks, or anything. Anyone know what's doing this?

Thanks in advance!

[Mike Wiering]

1) Sometimes when I delete a file, it takes a *long* time to delete the file. It says "deleting..." and I can literally get up, get a cup of orange juice, and come back before it's finished. Anyone know what causes this? It's not every file I delete, but it happens often enough to really tick me off. That's because it copies the file to the recycle bin. Hold Shift down while deleting it to solve that.

I don't know about previewing images, that usually doesn't take that long here.

[SuperBug]

Welcome to the club :)

I found out that there is a problem in the windows explorer when you try to delete a folder by right clicking on it in the folder-view (left) and selecting delete - if you do this while (on the right side) you are viewing it's contents, you might have trouble deleting it (such as "file in use" or waiting a few seconds).

I also found out that deleting movies is a problem for WinXP. The reason for that is probably because the explorer tries to figure out the format of the file (in advance). If you you have a corrupted file then it scans the entire movie trying to guess the format - which freezes the explorer (you can fix that with a registry hack). I haven't had any problems with previewing images - yet :).

More fury: I have a frustrating problem with the quicklaunch toolbar. Every now and then it needs 10-20 seconds (!!!) to load. In the meanwhile it does nothing on the harddrive, it just waits. I'm guessing that MS did a lousy job with caching various stuff - I really don't know why it needs 10-20s to load ~20 icons. Poor algorithm or threading/synchronization issues (probably both ;)).

[oNyx]

For #2... try irfanview:
http://irfanview.com/

I would also disable all that preview stuff from windows.

[Sunshine]

Whenever I preview an image by double clicking on it to open Windows Image Viewer

I use AseeDC to view these files, but I am having a problem removing the Windows Fax Viewer as the default action? Can't you just dump that POS viewer and use your own? :mad:

[James C. Smith]

As Mike said, shift will bypass the recycling bit to avoid #1. Another solution is to empty your recycling bin. If it has a lot of files, even if they are all small, it takes XP a long time to decide which one it will delete to make room for the newly recycled file. If you manually empty it once in a while you can avoid this delay. And still use the recycling bin.

[dyoll]

Right-click the bin, properties, choose "delete files immediately". Saves some space, and you get to be more careful with what you delete. ;)

[Devman]

If you haven't defragged in a while, make sure you try that. Make sure you have 20% free hard disk space, otherwise you have to run the defragger manually from a command line with the force option.

This is somewhat of a longshot, but if you haven't defragged in a long time, this type of behavior can happen, in my experience.

Peace!
Devman

[Cartman]

You might also try Disk Cleanup. I did this with msconfig on my wife's computer last night after upgrading her to SP2. This made her machine alot faster. Just have to get the defraging done next on it.