# Win 7/XP Painfully Slow File Listings On Network Shares



## jaxtraw (Aug 7, 2010)

Having got a new Windows 7 (64 bit Ultimate) PC, I decided to turn my old PC (XP Pro) into a file server. After much fun with Windows networking, I have one particular problem. Listing files on the server from the Win7 machine is ridiculously slow. A few directories have large numbers of files in them, around 10,000 image files. Browsing to one such folder on Win7, I have timed a listing and it took 48 seconds! That's a very long time to wait for a file listing. I have a network connection monitor running and it doesn't seem to be overloading the network- data was dribbling down the 100Base-T cable at about 200kiloBITS per second.

Trying things the other way around, the same folder if placed on the Win7 machine and listed from the old XP machine can deliver a complete listing in about 5 seconds.

I'm not sure which end has the problem; either the server is delivering file names very slowly or (my guess) the Win 7 machine is asking for them very slowly, perhaps asking for lots of crap that isn't needed like icons or file dimensions or something.

Anyway, this is far too slow to be useful. Has anyone got any ideas what could cause this? I'm stumped.


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## JimE (Apr 16, 2009)

Sounds about normal, from my experience anyway. I see similar slowness when searching network shares, and I don't keep but maybe half that many files in the larger folders.

In any event, a quick Google search turned up this: Windows 7 Network Slow - 6 Easy Ways to Make it Fast


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