Sunday, August 1, 2004

Please Tell Me Why

Please tell me why, when I delete a file in Windows Explorer (select file, hit the delete key), it takes like 30 seconds. From the command line, it takes no time at all.

14 comments:

  1. Oh, man! I am not alone! The same thing happens to me, and it drives me freaking nuts.

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  2. But it's so pretty. Isn't the aesthetic worth the time? ;-)



    That's yet another reason why I say, get a good command line shell (I use the Hamilton C Shell).

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  3. Raymond Chen is probably the person to ask that sort of question...

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  4. :)



    I'm already reasonably facile with cmd.exe, which has the benefit of being present on every system I work with. Not that I'm not looking forward to having something better at some point.



    However, if it were just a matter of dropping to the command line, I'd be all set. However, there are many times where I'm using Explorer via the built-in dialog boxes of third-party GUI programs. So regardless of the shell I use, it's still a matter of broken functionality.

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  5. Maybe because your recycle bin is on the verge of reaching the limit?

    Also, I believe delete from Windows explorer needs to notify many more listeners since it will be storing it in the recycle bin.. Such as making your COM dll registration to point at the recycle bin. . :)

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  6. I think you may be right. I had suspected the Recycle Bin, but thought I had emptied it earlier that day. Turns out I hadn't - there was a good 400 things in there, at about 200MB worth of crap.



    Still very annoying, even if I know the source.

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  7. I run a little scheduled daily script to empty my recycle bin of anything older than a few days. Not only does it speed up delete no end, it also speeds up shutdown, hibernate and suspend - for some reason, Explorer touches everything in the recycle bin on these events.



    Since, last time I checked, 1% was the smallest amount of space you could allocate to the recycle bin (so about 600MB on my laptop...) there can be an awful lot of files in there.



    But as someone also pointed out, a lot of things get notified when you delete an item in explorer.

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  8. So what's the command you run to do this?

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  9. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I've had the problem where the file to be deleted was a large file and I had to wait for my Antivirus program to scan the file before I could do anything with the file.

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  10. Oh, I'm sure you're not the only one to run into problems with virus software. Which is primarily why I turn off real-time scanning. I wouldn't run any AV software at all if I didn't have to to get on the Microsoft VPN.

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  11. I almost always hit Ctrl when deleting - this keeps the file from going to the recycle bin. However deletion from the gui is still slow!

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  12. Dan beat me to it as I was going to suggest liberal use of the SHIFT key (never knew about CTRL) to achieve the same effect: the delete operation bypasses the recycle bin.

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  13. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're going to just permanently delete files every time you delete, then why not turn off the recycle bin? Is it just to provide you the safety net of mistakenly deleting something?

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  14. OOPs - it is shift delete.



    By the way if your system is particularly slow I recommend you clean your registry and then do a registry defragmentation.



    There are various registry cleaners that have a preview period but most of them limit the number of items you can clean. Most recently I used RegSupremePro but i've used a numbe of others.



    To defrag your registry try pagedefrag from www.sysinternals.com.



    This can make a huge speed difference in explorer operations.



    Good luck



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