You may have noticed that in some cases your folders in Windows 10/8/7/Vista may become unresponsive and take quite a bit of time to display to display its contents and the green progress bar in the address bar loads slowly. At times it may even display a Working on it message along with the green bar.
This happens when your folder may have a lot of large document or images or music or video files.
Windows folder loads content slowly with green bar displaying
To optimize such folders, so that they load and display the contents faster, you may try the following:
Right click on the folder > Click Properties > Select Customize tab
Now under:
What kind of folder do you want?
Optimize the folder for:
Select from the drop-down menu the type of files the said folder predominantly holds. You may select from General items, Documents, Pictures, Music or Videos.
If you wish to apply this template to all the folders, also select the Also apply this template to all subfolders check box.
Click Apply > OK.
Next, open File Explorer Options and under the General tab, press the Privacy – Clear button.
You may also delete the File Explorer cache which is located here:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
You will now see that the contents of your folder will load and display faster.
PS: Some users have reported that disabling Cortana helped them. You may create a system restore point first and then try to disable Cortana and see if it helps you.
You can similarly fix a slow loading Downloads folder.
9 Comments
Thanks, this worked a treat!
thanks for the tip….
I am already using the folder optimization technique since Windows 7 release.The folder displays much faster after applying this trick
Thank you so much. I have been getting so upset about this when trying to get to a folder within a mapped drive it would refresh itself three times before the folder I wanted would show up. They should have just brought back the blank screen with the hour glass again like XP and previous versions of Windows.
This only helps if the folder contents are of a realistic size, if the folders contain a very large amount of files this trick is little to no help at all and you will still get the green “loading” bar.
doesn’t work for me and i see this fix everywhere
Must be a rare breed – a windows enthusiast – So if I want to apply this to my all my folders on all my drives – there is no global setting [Windows 8] ? I have to step through every head folder on every drive, sigh!
How do we kill this, with fire, is what I need to know?.. Decades of no “smart” optimization (by insane Micro$oft programmers) and my hard drives have remained in normal operating condition. Looking for the Service to Disable, to shut this down – like, pronto, OMG. o.0
and no multiple tab in explorer since the dawn of time.