Build 1511 - slow access to network drive

[Carol W.]

I'm writing this for my husband (PaulW on this forum). He recently was "forced" (so I'm told) to install build 1511. Since then, access to his My Documents folder on drive F: (a separate hard drive in his tower) has been exceptionally slow. Apps such as Excel, Outlook etc. are slow to open files and slow to close files. Eventually, files do open (and close) as they're supposed to but there is a noticeable time lag. I've seen it first hand.

In the case of Outlook, I moved his pst file from F: to C: which greatly improved Outlook's performance. I expected that would be the case since it is now on a local drive as opposed to a network drive. I'm thinking maybe he should move the entire My Documents folder from F: to C:.

Several questions:

• Is my assumption that F: is a "network drive" correct? I think it is but I would like to confirm. It's a second hard drive in the tower.
  Has anyone else experienced this issue, namely Office apps accessing files from a drive other than C: after build 1511 is installed?
  If so, what can be done to resolve this other than moving all files to C:?

Thank you in advance.

[HansV]

Is F: a USB drive?

[Carol W.]

No, it's not a USB drive. It's either an IDE or SATA drive. Do you need to know which?

[HansV]

No, I asked because there have been reports of USB being slow on Windows 8.1 and 10.

I hope that someone with more knowledge of hardware will respond.

[StuartR]

There is nothing in your post to indicate that F: is a network drive. How is it physically connected to the computer?

[Carol W.]

I wasn't sure if it is considered to be a "network" drive. That's the reason I was asking.

The drive is mounted in the tower and connected by a cable to the motherboard. In order to determine if it's an IDE or SATA drive, we would have to open the tower which we haven't done yet.

Again, the issue appears to have started after the build 1511 install.

Thanks for the reply.

[DaveA]

Is this "F" drive an external or internal drive?
If internal and is in his machine then NO it is not a network drive.
If it is NOT in his machine but another then it would be an Network drive.

I have 7 machines Networked and none of them happen to have slow access to any of the networked drives including my OEM Windows 10 machine. BUT, I do not have m
"My Documents" relocated.

[Carol W.]

DaveA,

Thanks for the reply. It is an internal drive. I used the wrong term.

Am I reading correctly that your My Documents folder is on C: on all your machines and that you aren't experiencing slow access to My Documents from Office apps?

[StuartR]

I wonder if the disk drive has a fault of some kind. Is there anything interesting in the system event log?

[DaveA]

How full is this "F" drive?

[Carol W.]

DaveA,

See screenshot of F: drive attached.

StuartR,

What Event ID should I look for in the system log?

Thanks.

[StuartR]

I can't give you specific Event IDs to search for Carol, if there are drive errors of any sort they should be obvious.

[StuartR]

There is a tool built in to Windows which will let you measure the speed of your disk drives.

You need to run a command prompt as administrator

• Windows-Key+X, then select Command Prompt (admin)

Then type the following command

• winsat disk -drive f

This will show you the stats for your F drive, you can do the same for the C drive and compare the results.

[aekyall]

If you have Piriform's Speccy program - and - your drive is 'smart enabled' in BIOS, I think Speccy would give you a fairly detailed analysis of the drives functions?? It certainly does for my two HDDs - whether it would provide the sort of info you need is, perhaps, another question - others, more technically gifted, can probably comment better.
HTH

Edited to add an example from my computer

Capture.GIF

[Carol W.]

Good Morning Gentlemen,

I Googled the following "office 2013 applications open slowly" and found a number of hits. See this article in particular. Users report that simply checking "Disable hardware graphics acceleration" in Options | Advanced | Display resolves the issue. So I checked it in Word and it carried over to Excel as I expected it would. I imagine that it's an Office-wide setting.

So far the results are encouraging -- no hang ups in opening Word and Excel files. I will report back within a few days and let you know the status.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

[HansV]

Thanks for sharing what looks like the solution!

[Carol W.]

Update: It's been five days since I changed that Office option. So far, so good insofar as opening files.

There was a subsequent issue concerning "not responding" messages when closing multiple Word docs open at the same time. I Googled that and discovered that one possible cause might be a corrupt normal.dotm file. So I deleted the file and let Word create a new one. The user (PaulW) then wanted changes to the normal.dotm file. He didn't care for the default font and the default paragraph spacing. I changed those and re-saved normal.dotm. That was yesterday. So far, I've had no user complaints .