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Every so often (hence 'randomly'), explorer.exe takes up 80+% of the computer's resources, instead of system idle process. It (explorer.exe) also takes up a lot of ram, like 36-60+. Rebooting helps, but I'm wondering if you can figure out what's the matter. My computer 'lags' a lot when this happens.
No I don't have viruses, spyware, or any other nonsense.
Windows is the matter. I'm not sure you can say much more than that.
Why must you be relentlessly unhelpful? xD
Stop running 15 billion applications at once, Windows can't handle it. What the heck is abc.exe?
another bittorrent client. And I don't run many apps at once
I have the same problem, but with a program called 'svchost.exe'. On the odd occasion, my computer will suddenly become unresponsive, and my running processes will freeze (or judder terribly). This happens every hour or so, and the only way to stop it is to manually terminate the svchost program and let it automatically start itself again. At times, the program has taken up to 468k of memory for itself. :(
468k of memory is nothing :p 40 processes is also nothing, I can average 50-60 on my PC/laptop at all times and never have problems for months on end :p
I've had SVChost do that on my laptop occassionally, until I removed the virtual private network server/dial-in listener, but I doubt that's your problem :p
A temporary solution to the lagging is to lower the process priority of Explorer in Task Manager when that happens to Below Normal/Low/Idle, so you can at least still use other apps without problem.
Does Explorer do that for you when you're browsing a folder with media files in, e.g. lots of AVIs?
*bump*
After a few more instances of this happening, I believe that it does happen after I browse folders with avi files. Now what?
That'll be Explorer unnecessarily trying to read the extended properties on those gigabytes of files then at the same time :p
It's not an "official" solution or anything, but the way I stopped Explorer doing it on my PC is to do a bit of registry editing. Find HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler in the registry and clear the default value there. Or delete the whole PropertyHandler subkey in that key if you want, all you're trying to do is remove the pointer telling Windows how to read extended info on avi files so it can't do that anymore. Yes, you'll lose also that extra Summary properties tab if you right-click > properties the file in Explorer, but it's hardly a big deal, expecially when the info on it can be wrong sometimes anyway :p Feel free to tweak any of the other file extension handlers in there too if you like, I've removed most of the multimedia ones like mp3 etc. on my PC :p You also don't need to reboot or even restart Explorer for the changes to take efect, they appear to affect Explorer immediately after you change the value.
Also it'd probably help to make sure you're not viewing the movie files as thumbnails, cause then they have to load on screen.
Cid's right, also I think Explorer lets you change which information it shows in the list view too. Like it can show you the resolution and crap if you view the most detailed view. And those sidepanes on the left will load tons of pointless info by default too, but you can close them.
I had this problem when I first got my new computer. It went away when I converted the drive from my old computer (which I added to the new computer) to NTFS. That's probably not your problem, but I like typing so I thought I'd do some of it here.
All my drives are NTFS anyway. I just did the registry modification. We'll see how it goes. Yay