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bunsen_hAbout a month and a half ago, I noticed that my Windows XP box seemed to be slowing down. The most noticeable problem was an increasing delay when I right-clicked on a file in Windows Explorer, before the list of possible actions appeared. Initially the delay was just a few seconds, but over time it increased to a couple of minutes.
I ran a number of system checks with several different anti-virus and anti-spyware tools. Nothing of interest was found. I found more hard-drive fragmentation than I'd expected, but defragmenting the drive didn't solve the problem. There seemed to be an increased amount of drive activity while the system was working on bringing up the file-action list, and I was concerned that there might be a drive failure about to happen. (As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
o_bunny has noted, there are two kinds of hard drives: those that have crashed, and those that haven't crashed yet.) It also seemed possible that the extremely large files used by VirtualBox to simulate my workplace computer environment were screwing up my machine, somehow, since the delays started at around the same time as my installation of that virtual system. Also, there were a couple of software tools that I'd installed and then removed which might have affected the file action list.
As far as the possible drive failure went, I was covered about as well as I could be, with the Seagate Replica external drive continuously backing up my files as they were changed. It was a Christmas present from my mother (per my request) and seemed to be doing its job. But it occurred to me that that continuous back-up process might also be affecting the file operations. I tried checking some of the possible trouble sources by systematically removing or disabling the relevant hardware or software, and eventually determined that the Replica software was the culprit. If I disconnected the external drive, the file actions were back to normal. A quick search on-line found a number of complaints about the same problem.
Apparently the Seagate Replica software takes a long time to search for all the older versions of a file to build its sub-menu in the file action list, and while it's working on that, Windows Explorer hangs.
The problem, of course, is that I didn't want to leave the external drive disconnected while I was using the computer. That would take away most of the value of having it in the first place: a system for backing up my files which didn't require my attention, and wasn't vulnerable to my fallible memory.
After a bit of guesswork about possible solutions, I found a software tool that allows me to control which options appear in the file-action list: FileMenu Tools, by Rubén López Hernández. I haven't played with it extensively, but it appears to do just what it says — a simple user interface to allow filesystem actions to be enabled/disabled — and does it pretty well. Under "Commands of other applications", under "All file system objects", I unchecked "CRebitContextMenuExt" (and it took me a fair bit of trial-and-error searching to determine that that was the Replica action). Voilà, my file operations are back up to their proper speed. If I do need to retrieve a file sometime in the future, I can re-enable that action.
It's a work-around, not a solution. I'm disappointed that the problem has been reported to Seagate repeatedly over quite some time, but nothing seems to have been done about it.
I ran a number of system checks with several different anti-virus and anti-spyware tools. Nothing of interest was found. I found more hard-drive fragmentation than I'd expected, but defragmenting the drive didn't solve the problem. There seemed to be an increased amount of drive activity while the system was working on bringing up the file-action list, and I was concerned that there might be a drive failure about to happen. (As
o_bunny has noted, there are two kinds of hard drives: those that have crashed, and those that haven't crashed yet.) It also seemed possible that the extremely large files used by VirtualBox to simulate my workplace computer environment were screwing up my machine, somehow, since the delays started at around the same time as my installation of that virtual system. Also, there were a couple of software tools that I'd installed and then removed which might have affected the file action list.As far as the possible drive failure went, I was covered about as well as I could be, with the Seagate Replica external drive continuously backing up my files as they were changed. It was a Christmas present from my mother (per my request) and seemed to be doing its job. But it occurred to me that that continuous back-up process might also be affecting the file operations. I tried checking some of the possible trouble sources by systematically removing or disabling the relevant hardware or software, and eventually determined that the Replica software was the culprit. If I disconnected the external drive, the file actions were back to normal. A quick search on-line found a number of complaints about the same problem.
Apparently the Seagate Replica software takes a long time to search for all the older versions of a file to build its sub-menu in the file action list, and while it's working on that, Windows Explorer hangs.
The problem, of course, is that I didn't want to leave the external drive disconnected while I was using the computer. That would take away most of the value of having it in the first place: a system for backing up my files which didn't require my attention, and wasn't vulnerable to my fallible memory.
After a bit of guesswork about possible solutions, I found a software tool that allows me to control which options appear in the file-action list: FileMenu Tools, by Rubén López Hernández. I haven't played with it extensively, but it appears to do just what it says — a simple user interface to allow filesystem actions to be enabled/disabled — and does it pretty well. Under "Commands of other applications", under "All file system objects", I unchecked "CRebitContextMenuExt" (and it took me a fair bit of trial-and-error searching to determine that that was the Replica action). Voilà, my file operations are back up to their proper speed. If I do need to retrieve a file sometime in the future, I can re-enable that action.
It's a work-around, not a solution. I'm disappointed that the problem has been reported to Seagate repeatedly over quite some time, but nothing seems to have been done about it.
