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I have a work laptop that works well when connected to my company's network. But when I work from home the computer lags and is slow when performing some operations.

I have noticed for example:

  1. When I try to browse for a file or folder in any software the computer becomes very slow, everything becomes unresponsive for a 10-20 seconds. Then everything is fine again.
  2. When I right click on anything in windows to open the context menu, same thing happens, the computer becomes unresponsive for 10-20 seconds.

My computer is running Windows 10 Pro 21H2, build 19044.1348

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 4500U with Radeon Graphics 2.38 GHz

RAM: 24.0 GB

My question is: how can I find out what exactly is causing this slow?

Edit 1: Some time ago the IT of our company made it so that all our Documents, Music, My Videos, My Pictures folders are on a network drive... in order to not lose our email archives if the computer broke... If this is the reason for the slows when working from home is there any solution?

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  • 3
    Sounds like Explorer is looking for a missing network drive or something of that nature. Any mounted network drives at work?
    – Gantendo
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 8:50
  • 3
    From experience having desktop shortcuts to network locations that are no longer available can cause such delays. Also check and purge the "quick access" area in Explorer and make sure your right-click "send to" menu doesn't have any unattached network drives.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 8:53
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    If yoy are purely having stuff on a network for backup, switch to a cloud provider like dropbox or onedrive etc. That keeps a local copy on your computer and syncs to the cloud.
    – davidgo
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 9:16
  • "If this is the reason for the slows when working from home is there any solution?" - It's possible have you reported this issue to your IT department
    – Ramhound
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 10:14
  • Yes, I had reported this to the IT department. and they tried 3 times to fix it without success...
    – Mihail-Cosmin Munteanu
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 10:34

1 Answer 1

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Found the solution for my case, but I feel this might work in any other case so I will add it here:

As suggested by other users, the issue was caused by some network locations that were not available because I was not connected dirrectly to the company network.

Even thought I am working from home I have a VPN which connects to the company network, but for some reason there were some differences in some of the paths that involved network locations.

For example I had the main network drive and the path had an IP:

EX: \192.168.172.1\NetworkDrive\ This worked when connected to the VPN

But some other (My Photos, My Videos, My Documents etc) had some text instead of the IP:

EX: \ND-PARIS\NetworkDrive\
And these paths without the IP were not working.

Not sure if these differences are due to connecting trough VPN or the IT department made a change and from now on the paths with IP are the correct ones...

Anyway, my initial thought was to just diconnect these locations. And according to this post: How to unlink the Pictures folder from OneDrive this can be done by modifying the registry.

So this is the solution I found, which should work in any case.

Step 1: Make a back-up of all your registry. This is very much needed, in case the paths with the name work when you connect dirrectly to the company network (without VPN). Then you can just restore the registry.

Step 2: Search for all the keys that have the wrong path: \ND-PARIS\NetworkDrive\ and you can either delete them or replace them with the correct path. In my case I replaced them with the IP path. There might be many keys that need to be changed. In my case there were 72.

Step 3: Restart PC

After doing these steps the context menu opens much faster and browsing for files no longer makes the computer unresponsive.

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