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Windows XP Woes

Occasionally, I will get on a stint to fix something on my computer that’s been bothering me. Today I decided that I just had to fix the fact that it takes me a long, long time to navigate though folders wit lots of images because Windows Explorer decides it needs to thumbnail all the images. Well, what seems like it should be an easy feature to turn off is anything but. After changing all sorts of normal and hidden options, messing with the registry, renaming system DLLs, and searching for hours on google, my system still goes to work to create all the thumbnails – even when it isn’t going to display them because I’m in detail or list view mode. It will contnue to drive me nuts when I’m opening a file in a folder with many large images (read: digicam download), taking minutes sometimes to get my system bak under control. Bah!

My brother was kind enough to run some tests on Mac OS X checking out the same functionality. OS X also creates thumbnails on local files, but it seems to do this truly in the background (XP’s takes over the system) and it doesn’t seem to try to do this over network connections (thank goodness). MS should start taking some ques from their Appletosh friends.

4 Responses to “Windows XP Woes”

  1. Shai Says:

    I looked around in the Group Policy editor, but sadly the only thing I could find relating to thumbnails was enabling/disabling thumbnail caching. You may be out of luck… or you might want to go dig around the policy editor… (don’t change anything if you don’t know what you’re doing though… it’s a VERY powerful program). Just go to the Run menu from an admin account and run gpedit.msc. Good luck!

  2. Shai Says:

    On second… maybe caching is what you want. I don’t really know as I haven’t tried messing with it.

  3. Bernie Zimmermann Says:

    This ought to help you. Good luck.

  4. Ryan Says:

    It turns out that the problem I was seeing was caused by Adobe Photoshop misbehaving with a shell extension.

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