Speed up all Explorer windows

When you open My Computer or an Explorer window, you may notice all your icons first appear as generic Windows icons before slowly filling in. You could also see the “wagging magnifying glass icon appear before anything else. This is Windows automatically searching for network printers and stores. If you aren’t on a LAN or would prefer to manually search for network resources, stop the automated process by opening My Computer and clicking Folder Options from the Tools menu. Click the View tab and uncheck Automatically Search For Network Folders And Printers.

Speed up Explorer’s Detailed View
Explorer’s Detailed View (choose Details from the View menu) displays information about your files in columns. If you have column headings such as Pages or Bit Rate, then Windows must peek into every file to populate those columns, which can take a lot of time. To speed things up, turn off any columns you don’t really need to see by right-clicking a column header and unchecking anything you don’t want. Click More at the bottom of the pop-up menu in order to see the complete list of available columns.

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