Win11 explorer bug?

Do you get a BSOD or a crash dump when it fails?

Clear FE's caches, then shut computer down to cold, then boot back up. Did anything change?

Google on the symptoms and see if you have company.

Joe Gwinn

I'm not using Windows 11 yet but when testing it I have noticed Explorer often dies and restarts itself.

If you installed anything recently which can be uninstalled, try uninstaling it.

The most recent reason I had with Explorer completely failing to start on startup (just a black screen with mouse pointer) was that someone had installed this:

It took a while to figure out because I could get a command prompt via task manager but no desktop.

I know win 10 FE does not like searching network shares. Never been fixed.

Cheers

Oh, if it's that, Linux suffers from that problem too. The trouble is that GUI file explorers want to know everything about a file, even remote ones, and even when it isn't actually required to show any of it. It will even download the whole file *contents* just to make tiny little icons! What a waste!

All that data is costly to get. As a result it takes forever. Meanwhile, it won't respond to user clicks, so effectively it's hung.

Very poor software design, but there you have it.

Fortunately, in Linux we have 'ls' which is smarter.

Jeroen Belleman

The file explorer window just freezes up. It can be killed with the task manager and then it works again.

And, maybe unrelated, my PC has decided to do dead black screen once in a while, for 30 seconds or so.

And when I restart, the cursor has a little blinking hourglass attached for a day or so.

Windows is such garbage.

One site says to clear the cache, with a step-by-step procedure. In conformance to Microsoft standards, those steps don't actually exist any more.

Yeah, with fatigue. At work I just got Win11, and it's a learning experience.

The cache must still exist, so it's been moved somewhere. I suppose the modern answer is to ask CoPilot where it is and how to clear it.

Hmm. It may be the Edge cache, or this may be carried under Internet stuff.

Joe Gwinn

Sounds like a race condition where it is waiting for something that never happens and doesn't timeout properly. MS has lots of those :(

Try disabling the screen saver.

I have found Win11 almost as usable as Win7 with none of the troubles you see. Main advantage for me is that Win11 understands E & P cores.

Win8 was a complete crock of s*it. Win10 wasn't much better but I managed to avoid it entirely since Win7 was so good.

Don't expect me to stand up for MickeySoft!

Don't have one. LCDs don't need them.

What's an E&P?

Economy cores (E) are good for general stuff working at human data rates and much lower power whereas Performance cores (P) are good at running flat out but power hungry. Win11 is the first version that properly allocates heavy CPU bound tasks consistently to the right sort of core!

My new monster Win 11 tower, with a gigantic heavy GPU and terabytes of SSD and 16G ram, only runs LT Spice about twice as fast as my old laptop. I was disappointed... I was hoping for 10x or so.

Spice is the only thing I do that needs a lot of compute power.

Trouble with solving huge non-linear matrix problems is that they don't parallelise at all well. You could well be better off with whichever of the current CPU crop has the fastest single threaded performance.

Provided that it is only for scratch working it is still worth at least considering using the dangerous for risk of data loss RAID0 in a matched pair configuration to nearly double effective disk bandwidth. There is much less advantage doing this trick now than their used to be.

Obviously data is toast if anything goes wrong so don't store important results on it long term. I no longer bother but it might help you.

I wish the monster graphics processor could run Spice.

We back up brutally, on local servers and online.

Once a month I get a multi-terabyte USB hard drive with copies of all our servers and our shared Dropbox accounts. We treat them as write-once, and distribute them around California.

Why do you use the monster graphics processor then?

I find that for my work the built in graphic capability of Intel chips is more than adequate for all 2D work and tolerable for 3D if you never do too much full scale photo video rendering and flybys.

Useless for gaming, AI code or realtime video editing but at present I don't do any of those often enough to merit a fancy fast graphics card in my main machine. I prefer to have it run cool, quiet and well under

When editing documents or diagrams and no serious computations are running I sometimes get warnings that the CPU fan has stopped.

I hope you verify that you can get the data back if you had to.

We have IT consultants. I told them to get me four identical PCs, small towers with modest graphics and Win10. They bought four monsters that I literally can't carry alone, with a crazy GPU mess. The motherboard is about 8" square and the GPU is the size and weight of a small tractor.

After months of tuning and registry edits and add-ons, it's usable but not enjoyable.

They do seem to be reliable.

The SolidWorks viewer works fine on my old Win7 machines, or on an old laptop. As does PADS.

I have a bunch of times, to update various machines in the field. It has worked every time. And we have *lots* of backup drives.

I will concede that it is extremely difficult to convince any vendor that you want such a high spec machine with very basic graphics. I think it went round three times before they accepted that I really knew what I wanted and understood the trade offs involved. Sales questioned it, pre-build review questioned it and then the guy building it rang up too.

Yes I was sure I didn't want their high spec graphics card using twice as much power as all the rest of the machine put together.

I don't find Win11 different enough to Win7 to really notice anything other than a few minor cosmetic niggles that are easily fixed like right click menus that by default don't include the features I use most often.

That's the content indexer, and you can uninstall it.

Can also be the "find type of file by content" feature in browsers.

File drag and drop is the worst. If the destination file exists, you have to enter a secondary dialog that itself makes no sense.

I have to read the file dates and times manually, before I copy.

I do have a little program that copies folders and only does the later date files.

Another bad thing about 11 is that it likes to pop up ugly things that make it hard to see what you are doing.

And keeps changing folder views. I don't want to see cartoons just because I'm copying a jpeg.

Why does the biggest programming team in history write such garbage code?