Why do my Desktop Icons refresh slowly?

[ricardo09871]

My Windows XP Pro desktop icons are refreshing as a batch every five minutes or so and quite
slowly also. This usually happens after I close another application that's been covering
the desktop. I've got about 50 desktop icons and they are set for Auto Arrange.

Is that too many?

I am not using any desktop theme other than a solid color and have active desktop turned
off.

My video card is an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro plus a P4C-3.0 (800) on a Intel i865
chipset mainboard. I have 1 GB of DDR PC3200 memory and I let Windows manage my Pagefile.
All my hardware drivers are up-to-date.

Thanks.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

It is too many, well, it is a lot of icons. It might well be the source
of the issue as each shortcut on the desktop is tied to a specific
application as a single entity. When the desktop refreshes, each icon is an
individual component. This likely isn't the case but since ATI and nVidia
now produce onboard versions of their cards I need to ask you to be sure
your system's graphics card is not sharing memory with main system memory.
If not, how much memory of its own does the card have? If it is sharing
memory with main system memory, no matter how much main system memory there
is or how much is allocated to the card, you will have memory related issues
of this type.

Some refreshing is normal and the more icons on the desktop the slower that
might be but there are other factors as well, such as how memory intensive
was the application you were running before closing it and returning to the
desktop.

You might also want to be sure your antivirus software is up to date and run
a scan. Also, download, install and run Ad Aware as you may have some
malware on the system that might be a source of this issue:
www.lavasoftusa.com

 

[Neil]

Yes, get rid of all the short cuts/downloads/.Zip files that you have
already extracted. Also look to see what your desk top refresh rate is set
at in comparison to the size of monitor that you are using. That should
speed up the machine big time. While you are at it go ahead and get rid of
the programs that are in the sys tray that you never use. Most of them have
an option to not display in the systray or not start during boot up. Other
than that your machine should be really fast.

 

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

"Also look to see what your desk top refresh rate is set at in comparison to
the size of monitor that you are using. That should speed up the machine
big time."

Could you explain what a monitor's refresh rate has to do with the speed of
a computer? And does this also apply to LCD monitors?

Rocky

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

Just can't resist responding to another Jay Ward fan...the progenitor of
Rocky and Bullwinkle among others.

To answer your questions which may well have been rhetorical since the
wording implies you know this but for others, the monitor's refresh rate has
no bearing on the icons refreshing on the desktop. Refreshing is a bit of a
misnomer as the action is known as "flashing," at least it was known as that
in Windows 9x and one of the reasons for the nomenclature was to separate it
from the "refresh rate" as applied to a monitor and graphics card. Refresh
rate applies to the speed at which the monitor refreshes the screen.
Flashing is tied to how the system redraws the desktop. It wouldn't apply
to the speed of the computer except in regard to whether or not the computer
would support the card and that's not speed related though there can be an
inter-relationship with regard to a graphics card's speed and the ability of
the computer to handle it, i.e. a slower system with a card with a lot of
memory.

Would it apply to an LCD, well, not really.

And to all my friends in Frostbite Falls, a hearty hello!

 

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

I am a diehard Jay Ward fan, hence the moniker.

I want to apologize to the groups, and especially to "Neil", for making a
post while having a big snicker on my face. No need to embarass people.
Besides, in my newbie days I used to ask questions that nobody could
answer...because they were rolling on the floor busting a gut.

Rocky

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

Me too!!!!!

 

[ricardo09871]

Thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions about my "too many" slowly refreshing
desktop icons.

My ATI AIW 9800 Pro card has 128mb of it's own DDR memory. I don't think it shares my
system memory, but is there a way I can tell for sure?

My system is pretty fast, so I believe it is matched up okay with the video card:

Windows XP Pro with the latest Service Pack (clean install)
P4 -3.0 (800)
1 GB PC3200 DDR Ram
DFI PS83-BL Mainboard with latest Bios
128MB AGP 8X ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro
All the latest hardware drivers and software updates

Everything runs great other than the icons refreshing slowly ... I'll clean up my desktop as
a first step.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

If the card has its own memory, it's not sharing with main system memory.

I would look into ad aware as mentioned previously just to be sure there's
no malware involved here, www.lavasoftusa.com.

From what you are saying, the problem may simply be too many icons on the
desktop.

Good luck.

 

[Andrew Portess]

My Windows XP Pro desktop icons are refreshing as a batch every five minutes or so and quite
slowly also. This usually happens after I close another application that's been covering
the desktop. I've got about 50 desktop icons and they are set for Auto Arrange.

Is that too many?

I am not using any desktop theme other than a solid color and have active desktop turned
off.

My video card is an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro plus a P4C-3.0 (800) on a Intel i865
chipset mainboard. I have 1 GB of DDR PC3200 memory and I let Windows manage my Pagefile.
All my hardware drivers are up-to-date.

Thanks.

Do a Google search for Windows XP Icon Cache and download the registry key
that allows you to manage the icon cache size. This worked for me.

Andy

 

[frodo]

having lots of icons on the desktop is a personal preference. if you like
it like that then that's just fine.

XP discourages it however, the MS folks did lots of usability studies and
decided (for us) that a cluttered desktop is bad. thus the desktop
cleanup manager was born.

your particular "problem" may be solved be enlarging the icon cache size,
a registry setting that at the moment eludes me [but see below].
however, an easy way to change it is w/ the cacheman utiliity, one of its
options is to enlarge the icon cache:

http://www.outertech.com

they have two utils, cacheman5.5 and the new cachemanXP. I don't know much
about the new one, the old one does have the icon cache tweaker tho.

googling for: "icon cache" registry

turned up this:

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/57/

it's the puppy to change manually if you don't want to bother getting
cacheman. up it to 2000 and see if that helps. BUT BE WARNED, the cache
file on disk is pretty large! its name is iconcache.db; mine is 8 meg,
and I have it set for 800 icons. Also, having a great big cache file
means that icon changes often don't "work right", since the icon in the
cache gets reused. the solution there is to delete the iconcache.bd file
to force a refresh. TweakUI also has a button (on the repair tab) that
does the same thing.

Good Luck

 

[ricardo09871]

Thanks ... I bought PestPatrol and use it religiously everyday ... used to use Ad-Aware and
it's good too.

I'll clean up my desktop a bit and also tweak the icon cache if necessary.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

You're welcome, good luck.