Every so often you get a real understanding of how piss poor the Microsoft environment really is.

My wife's digital camera takes very detailed high mega-pixel images and I've moved some of her folders over to my computer. When using Microsoft Window's Explorer to peruse through these folders I often have times when my workstation slows to a crawl or just locks up completely. I looked all over the internet to try to see why this would happen and found no real solutions.

Today I finally figured it out. I have 2 GB of RAM in my computer. I do very intensive video processing with that amount of memory. I opened Task Manager and watched what was going on as I moved Window's Explorer onto a folder with a good number of high mega-pixel images in it and, as the file browser looked at each image and tried to create the thumbnail, the memory usage climbed accordingly until all my memory was used up. I have other image browsing applications and they use nowhere near that much memory. They seem smart enough to open the file, create the thumbnail and release the original memory. Not Microsoft. Idiots.

Not only that but, if I see this behavior while Task Manger is open I can still close out the explorer window, something I cannot do if I don't open Task Manager first (I'm stuck rebooting) and one would think the memory would be released. No of course not. Why would Microsoft operating system software be so smart? The explorer.exe process is still running even with the window closed.

How those boneheads ever managed to corner the market is beyond me.

Guess I need to up my memory to 4GB to be able to browse my photographs with Explorer.

Art