How to Fix Slow Windows Folder Problems

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I was having trouble with some of my downloads folders taking over 10 seconds just to open the folder and display the content in the folder.  I thought the delay was caused by the slower 5400RPM hard drive but it turns out Windows and the way it optimized the folder was causing the Windows folder to load slow and take a long time to display files.

I did a video tutorial on how to customize your slow Windows folders so that they load faster and display contents much more quickly if you run into a problem where your folders load slow or folders display files slow.

Manual steps to fix Windows slow folder problems

Open up the folder that is slow to load, right click in the folder and click customize

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Here you want to optimize the folder for the right file types, unless you have video or images only in the folder, you should be selecting General or Documents if the folder only contains Office document file types.

Check mark Apply to all sub folders

Click Apply then OK.

Now try re-opening the folder and you should find that it is much faster to display content.

If this doesn’t work you may want to fiddle with your indexing settings for Windows.

To alter your file / folder indexing settings right click on the folder you want to update, click on properties.  In the General tab click on Advanced.

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Here you can uncheck allow files in folder to have contents indexed and it may improve your folder file performance issues.

Generally these two tips should solve most problems around Windows folders being slow to show content of folders, or files taking a long time to display in Windows folders.  If you still have slow problems, it could be the hard drive having problems, you can try defragmenting your hard drive, you could try compressing content as well.

Note, you shouldn’t have to defrag an SSD drive, only traditional hard disk drives.

Hopefully this will help improve the speed of the files displaying in your Windows folders if you arrived here and had the same issue as me.

Let me know if this helped or didn’t work for you.

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.