Vista system slow thumbnail view in Windows Explorer

I got a warning about low disk space on my Vista laptop. So I went back with removing unwanted programs in the system and also running disk cleanup and defragementation. I hope this would boost the system performance but it did not did anything great. I am having more than 400 photos in My Pictures. I am having a single partition of 260GB. There is a hidden 10GB partition which I think belongs to the recovery media. Now here whenever I go in My Pictures folder the system takes long time to show all the images. It works very slowly in generating the thumbnails. What can I do here to improve this.

You can download a good image manager software. ACDSee Pro is one of them. It is a nice image manager tool loaded with image editing features also. You just need to navigate to the photos folder and it will show you a tiny preview of every one. Try it.

The issue does not lies with Vista. It is due to slow hard drive. I think you had loaded lots of data in your system partition due to which you are facing issue. It is always recommended to keep Windows partition separate. So that if you face any problem atleast you can backup your data on some other place and format your pc. Now here you are using a single partition only. If you restore then you will loose all your data. Here you can check the drive status. There are some nice hard drive monitoring utility on the web. One of them is HDTune. Install this tool in your system and run it. It will give you information on the drive status. Defragmentation will not help you much. The system will keep on getting slower due to poor hard drive format. Better start copying all the images to safe place so that if the drive stopped working or if there is any severe system issue, you can atleast keep your data safe.

SmartDefrag is a third party defragging utility which I think will work on your system. Install it in your system and run it. It will simply make your system performance more better. I am using this on my system.

It looks you are having HD images. Due to which system takes long time to generate thumbnails. It is a one time process. Once all the thumbnails are generated the next time it will load faster. There is a bit difference between thumbnail and drive issue. For images it is better to use some kind of third party image manager, which not only allows you to edit images but also you can place them properly. The second thing you can do is keep the images on Picasa. It is linked with gmail account and offers 5GB of free space. So you can keep a backup on the internet for once. In case you lost your images you can re-download them back. This kind of issue usually appear with network pc. At my office images are stored on a central location. It is a shared hard drive. When I open it, the system takes around 10 to 15 minutes to display thumbnails completely. But on the regular drive it must work instantly. Slow drive can be a issue here.

Try to turn of background services. Launch Task Manager and see the system usage. If cpu/ram usage is high then your pc is performing slow. You can uninstall some unwanted applications and test back. Try ACDSee. I am also using it, it is a great image manager software.

System restore will give you basic help. It will restore the old settings back at the time when your system was working really fine. My friend works as professional photographer. He is having hundreds of folders in his system. He is having a mid range pc with Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB RAM. He is using Photo Director to manage all this images. Before he was using ACDSee Pro. But due to certain features limitation he switched to Photo Director. Now to see the photos instead of using Windows Explorer, he directly open them in Photo Director. It is a complete and highly featured image manager software by Cyberlink. You can also edit images in it. The tool comes with advance features like removing objects from images, fixing the image clarity, lens correction, etc. While if you are looking for a free solution then you can try desktop version of Picasa and Magix Photo Manager. Picasa is more easy to use and offer you a direct online sync. So that whatever photos you have on your hard drive, you can upload them automatically over the web.

You can fix that issue by enabling thumbnail caching. That might be disabled due to which you are getting so poor response. To fix that you will need to download Enable_Thumbnail_Cache.reg file from web and double click on it. Then click on merge. That's all.