SOLVED Loading times for Desktop Icons

[Marmit3]

Hi everyone,

This may seem like a silly little problem, but i would like to know if this is a common problem or not.

When i start my laptop (Win7 64bit pro) everything runs smoothly and the start-up process is rather quick. For the past few weeks however, i noticed that all the icons placed on the desktop take a long time to load. i would guess it has to do with the cache somehow but dont know enough about that to do anything about it.

Just to clarify: Windows boots fine, desktop appears, all my icons are displayed as "white sheets of paper" as in "waiting for the icon to appear". This loads after about 2 -3 minutes which would be fine if the actual booting time wasn't just 90 seconds. so loading the icons on my desktop nearly triples the boot-up duration. Is there anything I can do to accelerate this? can I save this into the cache so Windows doesnt need to search for these icons every time I start the PC?

Thank you kindly in advance for any hints ideas (or even lectures ;-) )

Marmit3

 

[Kougar]

My guess would be a corrupted icon cache.

If that's the case then it is an easy fix and won't harm anything to try this fix. Here's a Guide for deleting the icon cache, Windows 7 will rebuild it upon restarting.

 

[Digerati]

I agree.

That said, do note that icons on your desktop are shortcuts, each of which is loaded with your desktop when you boot. That can and does cause delays, especially if you have many shortcuts on your desktop. And a corrupt one, as I suspect you have here, can delay their loading.

So I recommend instead of cluttering up the desktop with icons, you create a couple descriptive folders on your desktop, and you move all (or most) of your shortcuts into those couple folders. This will organize your shortcuts, tidy up your desktop and should restore your boot times to something more normal. The folders still load with the desktop, but not all the shortcuts in them.

 

[Marmit3]

Thanks, i "fixed" the icon cache (don't think it was corrupted) and followed the advice to not have icons on the desktop which is somewhat sad, because i thought Windows could load up icons faster than that, but it will do the job.

 

[Digerati]

because i thought Windows could load up icons faster than that, but it will do the job.

Do you mean you thought Windows would load your programs faster if you have shortcut to them on your Desktop? If so, then no, it won't. Shortcuts are just for user convenience.

Windows loads up programs faster just by learning your habits. It uses pre-fetch and super-fetch to pre-load portions of the programs you normally use so when you click on the shortcut, the whole program is ready for you sooner.

 

[Marmit3]

no, thats not what i thought

i just meant that i had higher expectations in the loading times for Windows. It might jsut be that the amount of icons has increased significantly but i didnt think it had, so i assumed something else was wrong that slowed the boot process.

 

[Digerati]

Okay. So how long is it taking to boot? Note excessive boot times are often caused by a driver failing, or having problems initializing. Does it take a long time to boot into Safe Mode?

Any new hardware added lately? Any errors in Device Manager?

Have you scanned for malware?

 

[Marmit3]

i am not at home right now, so would have to guess which is no good to anyone. I will get back to you when i am home. Putting short cuts in folders has already improved it so i think this is as good as it gets. Malware was checked on Sunday.

 

[Digerati]

Putting short cuts in folders has already improved it so i think this is as good as it gets.

Well, one thing nice about having a few folders vs a bunch of shortcuts is you can organize your shortcuts into categories, and name the folders accordingly.