Member Avatar for sKiTzo

Everytime I open a folder that contains alot of mpg's and avi's the windows explorer suddenly makes my cpu usage 100% and bogs the whole system. I have a Pentium 4 - 2.5 gh with hyperthreading, 512 mb memory, and running XP pro. HELP! - thanks-

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Dani AI

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Quick note for . When Explorer spikes to 100% on folders full of .mpg/.avi files it is usually Explorer itself doing thumbnail/preview work for every file, or a third-party thumbnail/preview handler (codecs or shell extensions) misbehaving. Your CPU and RAM are adequate; this is an Explorer-side issue. was right to suggest previewing as a trigger — try the focused troubleshooting below to isolate and fix it.

  • Turn off thumbnails: in Explorer open Tools -> Folder Options -> View and enable "Always show icons, never thumbnails". Also switch the folder to Details or List view so Explorer stops building video thumbs.
  • Close the Preview pane (if it is visible) so Explorer does not load preview handlers.
  • Remove stale thumbnail cache: show hidden/system files and delete any Thumbs.db in the folder (do this after disabling thumbnails).
  • Test in Safe Mode or under a different user account. If the problem disappears, a third-party shell extension or codec is likely at fault.
  • Use a shell-extension utility (e.g., ShellExView) to disable non-Microsoft thumbnail/preview handlers and retest. Update or uninstall recently added codec packs.
  • Temporarily stop real-time antivirus or indexing services while offline to rule out on-access scanning (do not leave protection turned off).

If those steps do not help, gather a Process Explorer CPU stack and a list of shell extensions and post them (or a HijackThis log as suggested) so responders can identify the offending handler.

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Member Avatar for DaveSW

are the folder settings set to try to preview them in some way? e.g. if you leave it there for a while does it eventually complete what it wanted to do and display some sort of preview? other than that you might want to head over to the security forum and post a hijackthis log.

Member Avatar for sKiTzo

thanks I appreciate the help

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