WinXP image folder problem

Has anyone experienced problems with Win XP being slow to read and display thumbnails?
I recently aquired my sons "old" PC as it was becoming too slow to run games, the processor was the same speed as my old one (2.21Ghz) but he assured me it was a superior processor to mine, it also had 3gig of RAM compared to my 1gig; plus a video card to allow extended desktop onto a second monitor (I have yet to try this)

The Hard Drive was formated and a fresh copy of XP instaled but I now get this problem when opening up image folders, this is on my back up drive which was added as a second drive after the re-install and also new folders created on the newly formatted drive, the thumbs take forever to load, when they do not all of them display at full size and some even just dispaly a file icon, I have to do "select all" an "refresh thumbnail" to make any sense of whats what, if I close the folder and re-open it I have to go through the same process again, my image transfer rate (camera to PC) seems to have slowed down also.

Any ideas?

Open a folder.
Menu: Tools -> Folder Options.
Choose the View tab.
See if the "Do not cache thumbnails" is checked.
Make sure it is un-checked. Apply changes, then be sure to click to Apply to all Folders button.

Alternatively, if selected, try turning it off. It might solve some of the issues. But you'll likely have to wait for images to refresh every time (rather than manually doing so).

Couple of other points which may help with performance

1. Have you installed SP2 plus on-line updates
2. Have you installed all the motherboard drivers (especially the Bus and USB ones)
3. If the second drive is EIDE its best to have it on a different channel (cable) to the main OS drive


Its also worth checking that all the drivers have installed properly go
start - control panel - computer management - device manager
and check that there are no red crosses or yellow exclamation marks against any devices.

Could be a lot of things, but I think the suggestions here are good.

Slowness of image transfer could be the USB ports or if you are using a different card reader it is a slow one, go back to the old one.

The hard disk could be on its way out and doing strange things, back up just in case.

Thanks for the input guys, but the problem still persists, XP has updates instaled, motherboard drivers are all OK, no problems showing in device manager, I'm going to try and find an answer on an XP forum.

If you have IDE drives, and you have added the second drive to the primary IDE controller as a slave (with the system drive - C: drive on Primary/Master), move the second drive to the secondary controller as master.

This is not an issue if you have SATA or SCSI drives, which I think is unlikely given the CPU speed that you have mentioned.

Thanks Peter, I'll check that out as soon as I have the time, not sure how I configured the drives, though the primary drive (my OS) is indeed a SATA.
I have probably configured the two IDE as master and slave and left the DVD on the second cable.

I picked my sons brains on sunday (he's an IT engineer) he reckons its simply a case of windows explorer throwing a tantrum, especially as the problem is with every drive including the SATA.

If the SATA has the main OS on it then re-configuring the IDE drives won't help unless you are copying files between them.

Thought comes to mind:

Check that the windows paging file is only applied to the SATA drive and not to the IDE drives
Right click my computer
Properties
Advanced
Performance
Settings
Advanced
Virtual memory
Change
Click on each disk in turn and check that no paging file is selected on the IDE drives and that system managed size is set for the SATA drive.

You might also want to check that all drives are healthy
Start - control panel- administrative tools - computer management - disk management
The list will tell you were page files are set, which is the system drive etc...

Also try Ctrl+Alt+del (with no progs running) and see what the CPU and page files are doing. CPU should be <5% and page file <250Mb

It might be worth checking your anti-virus software if installed, I saw one (Afraid I cant remember which) a while back that had big trouble whenever accessing lots of files at the same time.

I ditto confused's answer and also check that you haven't got any indexing software running (e.g. XP's own "make searches faster" or google desktop search or microsoft live search)

Had a visit from my brother this morning, he sorted out my problem in about five minutes, it seems there was some sort of conflict between windows explorer and adobe photoshop, something on the lines of both photoshop and win explorer trying to produce thumbs at the same time, my image folders are now up and running

thanks to everyone for the advice