Not to be confused with Internet Explorer of course.
The other day I had a client that complained that whenever she opened “My Computer” it would sit there for 30 seconds before it responded. It would even show as “Not Responding”.
Initially I thought it might be Virus Checker problems. I uninstalled it. No difference.
After I had a look in the event log I found some stuff that pointed to Windows Search and DNS issues.
I turned off the Client DNS service as this is only really used if there are no DNS servers on the network and to decide on a Master Browser. Anyway that didn’t make any difference.
Next I turned ON Windows Search (as I had previously disabled it as we wanted to use Google Desktop instead). Anyway this didn’t work either.
The funny thing was that when I opened “My Documents” it opened instantly with no delay. If, however, I opened iTunes it would take again about 30 seconds.
OK before you lose interest, here’s what I found; She had mapped some network drives! Now normally that wouldn’t be a problem but she had to manually establish a VPN connection to allow those drives to work. In essence when she opened any application that looked at all the drives on the machine it would hit the mapped drives and stop. It couldn’t access them but would keep trying until it timed out (which unlocked Windows Explorer).
Solution? I created a small script to map and disconnect the drives;
net use s: \\server\share
That maps it.
net use s: /d
That disconnects it.
Put them in two different scripts and make shortcuts on the desktop and that fixed the problem.
Tags: itunes slow, my computer not responding, my computer slow, windows explorer slow
