How to browse files and folders fast

Q Is there a limit to the number of files you can store in the My Documents folder? Mine is quite full and I’m finding that it takes a long time to open. I have about 40GB of files, and the My Music folder alone contains about 30GB of music stored in separate folders.

My computer has 3GB of memory and a quad-core CPU, so it’s up to date, and I am running Windows XP Media Center Edition with 180GB of free hard disk space.

Alistair Stephenson

A If you have a single folder containing hundreds or thousands of subfolders it will take longer to open.

Information has to be read from the disk about each subfolder, such as the full folder name and the date it was last modified. If you have the folder set to Thumbnails view, then it will also attempt to load and refresh a thumbnail image for each item, and this can slow down Windows Explorer if you have a lot of subfolders.

The best advice is to try to organise your files better, reducing the number of subfolders in a single directory, which will mean less information having to be loaded at once. To disable Thumbnails view, open My Computer, then left-click on the View menu.

Change the view to List mode. If you wish to use List mode to browse every folder on your PC, open My Computer and make sure the current view is List. Then left-click the Tools menu, select Folder Options, and then the View tab. Click on the button labeled ‘Apply to All Folders’.

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