Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Microsoft is tackling File Explorer's sluggish launch times - not by stripping out the bloat or optimizing code, but by preloading the application in the background. The update to File Explorer arrived in a Windows Insider build for the Dev and Beta Channels, alongside the Xbox full-screen experience for PC and a point-in-time …

[Lee D]

Explorer

I still love that, in 2025, explorer just freezes/hangs if you have a network path that's unavailable ANYWHERE on your drive list.

You'd think that kind of stuff could have had a separate thread farmed out to check the connection and the explorer window say "Loading...." or something while it did but still remain otherwise responsive but no... we're just going to hang up all explorer processes (including file save/open dialogs) until we ascertain that all mapped drives are online, spinning up the storage unnecessarily, even though that's not what the user is looking at, and we're not going to let you do a damn thing until they are.

Honestly, it was kind of forgivable in Windows 3.1. Windows 95 should have fixed it. But here we are... in 2025... and it STILL does that.

[AMBxx]

Re: Explorer

Not forgetting that rarely used external HDD that has to spin up before anything works.

We've gone from single core CPU @ 33MHz and <1MB RAM with instant Explorer to a multi-core (16+) @ 4GHz and 16GB RAM taking 20 seconds to start Explorer.

[Sudosu]

Re: Explorer

Copilot has to ingest all that data before you get access.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Copilot has to ingest all that data before you get access.

should that not be...

Copilot has to ingest all that data , send it all to Microsoft and get full confirmation of the receipt, before you get access

[kmorwath]

Re: Explorer

I got an HP laptop where the HP optimized power settngs tuned off hard disks after ONE minute. It made a LaCie external hard disk unusable, until I discovered the cause.

Anyway if I were Microsoft, I would give a look to Explorer <-> Defender interactions.

[sedregj]

Re: Explorer

" still love that, in 2025, explorer just freezes/hangs if you have a network path that's unavailable ANYWHERE on your drive list."

If it helps, it seems that Dolphin does too (Linux box with KDE n that).

Obviously the notion of a "drive" is Windows wankery - one mounts one's remote file systems. I have to live in a Windows world at work - I use pam mount to connect up a series of shares under a single directory. If my VPN is down and I access that folder, things lock up for a while. To be honest it is actually quite quick to recover and does seem to just work most of the time.

The real fix is SMB over https (oh yes!) There is a Kerberos proxy over https too and I have deployed it at work and it does just work for both Windows and Linux. One day I'll look into SMB over https.

Refs wrt Kerberos proxy:

https://syfuhs.net/kdc-proxy-for-remote-access - MS Blog on KDC Proxy

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/779228/the-parameter-is-incorrect-error-using-netsh-http-add-sslcert - SO discussion about http add sslcert

https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/mitK5features.html - MIT Kerberos v1.21 features

https://k5wiki.kerberos.org/wiki/Projects/KDC_Discovery - KDC Discovery via DNS

https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/admin/https.html - MIT Kerberos documentation on using a proxy

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: Explorer

First thing I do on KDE is to install Caja, and make it the default file app. Sanity is restored!

Even without the slowdowns, Dolphin is such a toy.

[FIA]

Re: Explorer

I still love that, in 2025, explorer just freezes/hangs if you have a network path that's unavailable ANYWHERE on your drive list.

You've just reminded me... there's a setting 'Open each folder view in it's own seperate process', that has been there since NT... it default to off, which if I remember Dave Plumber correctly is because of resource constraints on NT era systems.

I've just turned it on, wonder if it helps. (as it probably should).

Maybe the default should be changed??

[Smirnov]

Re: Explorer

Well, we still have a default of not showing extensions for known file types which helps malfeasants to get people to open random files like "invoice.pdf.exe".

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

So it slows down faster too?

Pre-loading will make the slower-over-time happen sooner.

Effect since 21h2: Explorer gets slower over time (the four weeks between update reboots), simple actions like drag and drop, rename and so on get slower and slower. Until it crashes-restarts, or you taskkill and restart it.

If you never have more than two explorer windows open which you close when not needed, then you may not have that effect. But I do. That that, sadly, includes Server 2025 as well.

Keep in mind: I've disabled a lot of default shell extensions, all preview handlers, thumbnail handlers, "ask copilot" hack-ins and so on. And it still happens.

[Sudosu]

Re: So it slows down faster too?

Its not directly related but I used to kill the indexing service to speed things up markedly.

Not sure if that still works on not as I am not on Windows anymore.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: So it slows down faster too?

Indexing is disabled of course, WSearch service disabled. Besides the speedup (which is not much though on SSD/NVME), "cmd.exe" with "dir *filespec* /b /s /a" is faster anyway. And more reliably since indexing is always behind for new files.

[FIA]

Re: So it slows down faster too?

Shout out for Wiztree here. It just parses the MFT so it's file finding stuff is very quick. Great little utility.

[Dan 55]

Re: So it slows down faster too?

What happens when they finally pre-load the whole of Windows when Windows starts, are they back where they started?

When they reach that point they'll probably try and preload their preloads instead of debloating Windows.

[JimmyPage]

All I ever wanted

Was a graphical file manager.

How can it take MS 30 years to not deliver one, whilst Linux has ..... well you count them .....

[sarusa]

Re: All I ever wanted

I highly recommend XYPlorer (https://www.xyplorer.com/) I've been using it for over a decade on all my machines, and zOMG you can just buy it for $15 and not pay a subscription, what a concept!

Now I'm going to have to figure out how to kill off this Explorer pre-loading because it will be extra worse than useless, as usual for anything MS has done since Win11 launch.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: All I ever wanted

You can always change your HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Shell REG_SZ. For example to cmd.exe, powershell, bash, the WSL-shell, or your prefered shell replacement.

[kmorwath]

Re: All I ever wanted

Just for example the default Ubuntu Gnome Files is as much ugly as it can be, and looks designed by someone who can't understand GUIs.

The fact you can choose among hundreds of them is irrelevant. If you use a single PC is OK, when you have to manage a fleet of them, you can't have a different file manager on each on them, most of the time you need to work with the default one.

For the matter you have Explorer replacements as well - but you can't expect to find them on each PC you have to mange.

[IamAProton]

reminds me of Windows prefetch

i think it started with Win7 (perhaps Vista)

OS was preloading all the most used applications at startup, so the total waiting time was the same, but you were experiencing it at every system reboot, even if you just need to quickly check a text file.

MAde a littel sense if you go for a coffee every time while the computer boots.

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Re: reminds me of Windows prefetch

Treat the computer like a digger.

Turn it on, and immediately go for tea or coffee. Thus, the machine can warm-up/pre-load everything, so that when you return, it is ready for action.

[LionelB]

Re: reminds me of Windows prefetch

But what do I do while the coffee machine is booting up?

_{Anyone familiar with the redoubtable DeLonghi Magnifica will know what I'm talking about.}

[Tim99]

Re: reminds me of Windows prefetch

Yes, the replacement for my machine now requires an internet account with bluetooth/WiFi. I just want a cup of coffee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I just want a cup of coffee...

“So that’s it, is it?” said the Nutro-Matic when he had finished.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That is what I want.”

“You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?”

“Er, yes. With milk.”

“Squirted out of a cow?”

“Well in a manner of speaking, I suppose…”

“I’m going to need some help with this one.”

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

[Jamesit]

Re: reminds me of Windows prefetch

Prefetch started with XP.

[Someone Else]

What was old...

So this just goes to reinforce and confirm what I and other commentards here have been saying for...well, quite some time, actually: There are no longer any competent programmers employed (or contracted) by Micros~1.

_{And if anyone wants to try to convince that ClippyPilot is competent, I gotcha this bridge...}

[Rich 2]

Bag of shite

“Yet preloading an application rather than examining what's slowing it down feels like treating symptoms, not causes“

Feels like tearing the symptoms? You are being way too generous!

MS is utterly incapable of writing any decent software. At best, they are totally incompetent. At worse, they are fraudsters.

[chivo243]

Re: Bag of shite

It just fosters and furthers the argument that we need faster and faster computers, when in reality, the opposite should be the trend.

[Dan 55]

Re: Bag of shite

Be careful what you wish for.

[ChrisC]

Re: Bag of shite

If I had a pound/euro/dollar/etc every time I found myself sat in front of a modern Windows PC, thinking "why is this damn thing, with orders of magnitude more raw processing power, memory, drive transfer rates etc than my old 80's era Amiga, still SO much slower at performing simple, core, tasks - starting an application, displaying file properties etc", with bonus payments for every time I *also* was then left wondering "why can't it multitask as efficiently as Workbench used to manage", then I'd have been able to comfortably retire some years ago..

[Nightkiller]

It seems that every version of Windows adds an extra minute to whatever you want to get done for whatever reason.

[Acrimonius]

From Windows 10 you should count the minutes per each update and not version. Really into take a coffee break zone now

[ThatOne]

> It seems that every version of Windows adds an extra minute to whatever you want to get done for whatever reason.

The reason is that computers are getting faster and faster, with always faster disks and more memory. So coding can become more and more sloppy ("cheaper" I think management calls it).

[IGotOut]

("cheaper" I think management calls it).

Fiscally Efficient I'll think you'll find.

[Dwarf]

Unfortunately, they are not measuring the real cost - to all their customers, every day when using this buggy software.

Focus on your customers, not your internal staff overhead.

Get real people to write code, not AI

Get testers to test things, not customers.

None of this is difficult. Software profiles and debuggers have existed for many years, yet it seems that many have forgotten how to use them effectively.

[ThatOne]

> Focus on your customers

You're kidding? You must be kidding. There is only one metric worth considering, and that's your bonus. Your bonus is calculated on how much money you made or prevented spending in the previous fiscal quarter. The future doesn't count, and clients count even less (unless they're "new clients" of course).

_{Disclaimer: Above statement(s) is/are an example of "sarcasm", and shouldn't be taken literally.}

[Grunchy]

Midnight Commander still works

I still use it on my Linux Mint even. Why not, it still works. It seems me Midnight Commander sort of duplicated the interface from Norton Commander, which to me closely resembled some kind of copier I used to run in C64 days, possibly Fast Hackem.

Which had this distinction: “a disadvantage was the end of ‘leisurely coffee breaks or refrigerator raids’ during copying” (because the dang thing actually works).

Whatevs.

[PRR]

Re: Midnight Commander still works

> Midnight Commander sort of duplicated the interface from Norton Commander

No 'sort of' about it. Commercial Norton was more polished than early Midnite but MC clearly aped NC.

But NC may not have been "novel". It may have been ideas going around at the time. 1DIR, Buerg's LIST, and other file tools (most superior to Win11 File Explorer) (and I just today noticed that if you try to kill File Explorer in TaskMan, it's now 2 processes, and you can only kill the lower one, ant it won't stay dead) often had 2-up option.

[yoganmahew]

Re: Midnight Commander still works

I also remember some class of 2list that lets you have two windows file manager trees open in the same window! Side-by-side! (2list may have been my alias for it...).

[Stanley Toolset]

ALINT (At Least It's Not Teams)

I'd take a slow Explorer over the 'modern' Teams any day. At least with Explorer I stand a chance of finding things at Work. Explorer at least lets me copy/paste files from/to locations where I want them. Teams OTOH is some rejig of Sharepoint - things get lost, mislaid, or can't be copied around, so I ( we) end up with multiple copies of them, with all the versioning issues that ensue, scattered all over the bloody place, & I consider it a good day's work well done if I can find any one of 'em within half a pint of needing them.

[sarusa]

Re: ALINT (At Least It's Not Teams)

Teams is half a dozen apps MS bought (or had, like Sharepoint) stapled and glued together with cloves and jizz into a barely functioning shambling, stinking, mess. There is absolutely no coherent design or rhyme or reason to any of it, so, yes, you spend all your time trying to find in which 'subapp' that file is.

One or two components kind of work okay on their own, like the video conferencing is as good (bad) as Zoom or Google Meet, but then it's still got its own grotty chat.

[UCAP]

Re: ALINT (At Least It's Not Teams)

There is absolutely no coherent design or rhyme or reason to any of it

That pretty much sums up anything hacked together by Microsoft

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: ALINT (At Least It's Not Teams)

Teams has nothing to do with out local computer. That thing stores everywhere, but not your computer. Unless you run a local sharepoint server :). But who does that?

[sarusa]

This is Nadella at the peak of his powers.

Vibe coded vital system utility is too slow and bloated and there are no competent coders left in the company? Uhhhh... we'll just load it at start and slow that down and steal all your RAM! Good job everyone, AI wins again!

[TReko]

They already preload MS Office at boot

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/microsoft_will_preload_office_apps/

Instead of optimising code, AI says preload for the easy win.

Reminds me of a very old joke:

"c - the speed of light, constant, independent of the speed of the observer.

w - the speed of Windows, constant, independent of the speed of the hardware."

[blu3b3rry]

The level of shittery modern Windows OSs have reached almost feels like it's as a result of malevolence rather than simple "not caring".

Work laptop is a 11th gen i7, 32GB ram, NvME SSD. It should be a fast, powerful machine that shouldn''t struggle with any task thrown at it.

Enter Windows 11, which causes it to run as sluggish as if there's spinning rust inside somewhere, while the fan screams desperately trying to keep a maxed out CPU cool yet again as OneDrive goes nuts trying to sync up my stuff.

Next to the laptop on my bench is a cheapo HP thinclient that I picked up as a tinkering project. Inside is a passively cooled, dual-core AMD CPU from the mid 2010s with about 10% of the performance of the i7 chip in the laptop. Currently running latest Ubuntu.

It boots just as fast, browses files without hanging and can generally keep up with the laptop for day to day tasks....and it's a £15 thinclient. Needless to say, W11 feels like a fscking joke.

[David Hicklin]

> Work laptop

That's your problem, there will be so much corporate crapware in there that I am surprised that you can get anything done

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same experience. A 10-year-old laptop running the latest Ubuntu and latest software is as fast, or faster, than my last-year Windows machine from work. (And no, there's not much in the way of corporate software on it.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of development hours but not a few thousand meager to spare for truly core OS applications.

Microsoft has rested on its laurels for decades and used its monopoly position to retain market share past when other vendors would have been supplanted. I'm stating the obvious though.

File Explorer has always been abysmal and it would not take a lot of development time to vastly improve on it's function. Including an actual file search tool that functioned. If the free Agent Ransack can find a file quickly in a massive folder structure, certainly the OS vendor ought to be able to do so as well but the answer would be a resounding NOPE. Even with indexing inside of the OS, the search function is a joke.Third party Windows File Explorers are feature rich and stable, like the original one from the 1990s Amiga, Directory Opus.

As others have mentioned, it's 2025 - there is zero excuse for all of these windows applications to be so unstable and feature lacking. They haven't even finalized migrating the old control panel "cpls" entirely over into the Settings Application. Windows operates like a half finished Operating System but somehow Microsoft remains the monopoly vendor, while offering such incomplete solutions. They continue to release new "Feature" releases, without going back and fixing/enhancing extremely core applications like File Explorer and Search.

The truly sad part is as I mentioned, you are not talking about a lot of development hours to vastly improve both the stability and feature sets. These are truly core applications in Windows that users rely on. Somehow the bureaucracy is not be able to allocate the small amount of resources to a project to do so. Meanwhile, the user experience continues to decline with each successive version of Windows.

All it is going to take is one large software developer to release a desktop version of Linux that offers a just slightly more robust UI experience than current Linux desktops and convince vendors like Dell, HP, and Lenovo to promote it as a primary options with their product and Microsoft might just find itself supplanted from the Desktop.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

I'd prefer going backwards! The new panels offer no improvement other than wasting more space, missing (default hidden) and tiny scrollbars, and since windows 8 no clear telling where to grad the window to be resized or whether it can be resized, bad default Title bar not being colored if the applicatio is active so sometimes users, who do not change that, are unable to tell which window is active... etc..

[Roland6]

Re: …. but not a few thousand meager to spare for truly core OS applications.

>” and it would not take a lot of development time to vastly improve on it's function”

This has been one of the surprising things: the lack of purchases by Microsoft.

There are many good third-party utilities/replacements, being supported on a shoestring, you would have thought MS would have simply brought a few out and made their utility part of the standard Windows distribution..

[bazza]

From the article:

Microsoft is tackling File Explorer's sluggish launch times - not by stripping out the bloat or optimizing code, but by preloading the application in the background.

Genius.

I say, bring back Sidekick.

[vincent himpe]

i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

All the modern file browsers (even on mac) take oodles of time before they even start moving or copying a single file. They are first "estimating" how long it will take.

From a command prompt it starts directly. Why can't browsers do that ? I don't need to see an estimate. It's going to be wrong anyway.

[DJV]

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

This!!! Absolutely!!!

[Not Yb]

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

I miss (for very, very small values of nostalgia) the old Windows time estimate which would occasionally estimate negative time to completion, or years, usually because whatever was being copied was bigger than the estimation code was able to deal with properly. At least it was fast at the estimate... even if it was wrong

[David Hicklin]

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

Copying lots of small files really buggers up the time estimate.

[stiine]

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

Yes, because maths is hards.

[BJC]

Desktop?

As I recall, Explorer is also used to create the desktop. What's the benefit of pre-loading it, when it's needed to create the starting point (i.e. desktop) for most users?

I suspect many of the problems arise from extensions. My work PC is always reluctant to close Explorer on shutdown. My suspicion is that one of the extensions isn't responding to the request, from the host instance, to shutdown. I should probably try and track that down but it doesn't cause quite enough pain.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Desktop?

MS split it for performance reasons. Tho different DLLs and separate threads, IIRC. Don't ask me how effective the performance improvement is.

[PRR]

Re: Desktop?

> Explorer is also used to create the desktop.

No. As Jou says, that's old. Here on Win7 if I kill Explorer the taskbar and much else goes away. Over on the Win11 machine the file explorer is a separate thing. Tough to kill but does not affect the taskbar or my desktop, and comes back to life in seconds.

[Pascal Monett]

You want a proper indexing tool ?

Try Everything from Voidtools.

Install it as a service. Once it has indexed your disks, it can find any file (including wildcards) in barely the time it takes you to type out your search criteria.

You know, like it should be on computers that are a million times more powerful today than when Apollo 13 launched.

Turn off Windows "indexing" - which is nothing but a time-waster and a resource hog, and you will be free of that kind of trouble. And your CPU will be free to do actual work stuff as well.

Pair it with Midnight Commander and say goodbye to Redmonds' complete inefficiency.

[BasicReality]

Re: You want a proper indexing tool ?

I’ve been using that for a few years now, glad somebody else thought to mention it too.

[DS999]

Perfect time to introduce something that wastes memory

When memory prices are skyrocketing!

[BenMyers]

Why let's preload everything!

Why not preload everything? After all, memory is cheap. Oops! DDR5 prices are going through the roof, thanks to AI madness!! I could outfit my rig here with 128GB, instead of 64GB.

Microsoft does not know how to do simple and effective software. Instead, everything is complicated and ever more bloated.

[Oh Matron!]

Jeff Greeling....

Did a video this week comparing a Pi with some Generic Windows box.

Wasn't the balanced piece I was expecting, given that your Pi will consume less power that a Gnat's Fart, stay powered on literally for months on end, and comes with no bloatware installed.

He seemed to forget that the windows box will sh1t the bed literally within weeks

Why do we continue to tolerate such crap?

[bmontane]

So they're just offloading the performance issues onto startup? Great problem solving from a multi-trillion dollar business as usual. It's why our company is moving over to Google Workspace over the coming years, migrating everything from our 365 environment and SharePoints to all of Googles services because everything is just better. Not in the least the file syncing via OneDrive, that's a joke as it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

our company is moving over to Google Workspace

As someone working for a company which moved from MS365 to GWS years ago and which works with several large clients that did the same I can tell you that the only regret we have was that we didn't move over sooner. All the Google services are so much more robust and reliable than their MS365 counterparts, it's not even funny. GWS is also much easier to administer and lacks the schizophrenic UX of MS365 where functionality is spread around dozens of different UX panes of which most have at least 30% of their functionality broken in some ways.

We also got rid of Windows clients, users with newer machines got ChromeOS Flex and those with older systems got new (business-grade) Chromebooks. Helpdesk tickets dropped by >70% in the first year. Also gone are the days of building and babying a corporate Windows image and dealing with the fall out from shitty updates. Now if a user breaks or loses their device they get a new one where they just login and off they go without us having to ever touch the device before the user can do this.

Windows has the biggest TCO of all business platforms by a large margin. It's mind boggling how many businesses are willingly signing up for this shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a problem I saw at work today - a slow production database (very critical, very resilient, very performant database by design) has started causing timeouts on the API layer. Incident raised to address it.

Support's response was to increase the timeout setting of the API layers. With zero understanding of how the clients of those APIs will react. Problem solved hey?

[Always Right Mostly]

Preloading a pig doesn't stop it being a pig. The solution is to not have a pig in the first place.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

The solution is to have a fast pig in first place, and not overfeed it until it cannot move, even it is has 16 legs.

[User McUser]

How is this any different?

Last I checked, the "Shell" value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon is still set to "explorer.exe" meaning Windows loads it as soon as you login to your account...

How much sooner can it possibly load?

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: How is this any different?

Just for giggles and for you to learn: If you have a password on your local windows account you can check the time for login: i.e. after you press return for your PW, after a fresh reboot. Then logoff, and logon again. That is the expected difference. Problem: It won't really speed up the computer bootup-login-explorer, since that is what most do. It will only fake it, and need more time before login. Which counters some previous efforts which were put into Windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How is this any different?

Wasn't it NT3.51 (or NT4) that rearranged the startup order in Windows so that the CTRL-ALT-DEL prompt was displayed before the (networked) connection(s) to the domain controllers were ready. After three or four reboots followed by login failures, I added a cigarette break after each reboot so that when I returned, Windows was truly ready for me to log in.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: How is this any different?

No real difference today with work laptop: 500 times as much RAM, 12 times (SMT) CPU cores, each core ~100 times faster, storage is >1000 times faster... The only difference is Windows 11 and that I unload/load the office dishwasher instead of smoking...

[Smartypantz]

More worried about sluggish operation

Anybody who has used something like dolphin from KDE must wonder what the hell is wrong with the lame, blind, deaf and three-legged donkey that "explorer" is in comparison!

The responsiveness of dolphin on anything (mounted sftp, mounted smb or local file systems is astonishing!