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About 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.
( (Details of the solution are left as an exercise for the interested student...) )
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.
( (Details of the solution are left as an exercise for the interested student...) )
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.
