Creating a folder on a remote file share is very slow in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

I have a NAS that runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. I have my desktop PC which runs Windows 10 Anniversary update. I Recently noticed that whenever I wanted to create a folder in the NAS from my desktop PC, it would take a long time for the folder to be created. Long time here means about a minute or longer. This would make Windows Explorer very not respond until the folder is created.

After experiencing this several times, I did a workaround. I would create the folder locally and cut and paste it into the NAS. This would work without issues. But every now and then, I would forget to do this and I have to curse myself for forgetting to do the workaround.

Today I decided to check if this was a widely known issue. I came across this thread on TechNet which exactly described what I was experiencing. Many people had joined the discussion and there were few workarounds that had popped up.

• Disable Windows Search (not sure if it is on Windows 10, Windows Server or both)
• Use PowerShell to create the remote folder.
• Use 3rd party Windows Explorer replacements to create the remote folder.

Literally just minutes after I visited the thread, someone posted on that thread saying that Microsoft had fixed this in build 14965 which is only available for insiders on the fast ring.

We’ve fixed an issue where File Explorer might crash when creating or renaming a folder on a network share.

Since I am not really entertained by frequent troubleshooting anymore, I stick to final stable versions of every software I install. So, I guess I won't be getting this fix for a while. For now, I will just have to disable Windows Search, which doesn't work properly anyways. I use a 3rd party app called Everything to search files, which gives results super fast.

Edit:

Looks like disabling Windows Search service fixes the issue. I disabled it on both the client and the server and now the folder creation is instantaneous.

[Guide] Getting into Android Development–speeding up the emulator on Intel platform using Intel HAXM

Introduction

We guys in Japan are finally going to do some development for Android platform. First thing’s first. We need to setup the development environment.

I referred to the official development tutorial provided by Google. This means, I will be using Eclipse as the IDE. I downloaded and installed the Android SDK integrated version from Google. Here’s where you can download it from. LINK.

Since I don’t know anything about developing from Android platform, I started from the Building Your First App section. I did the coding for the Hello World app. Then it was time to run it. For that, I first had to create a Virtual Device because I don’t have an Android device with me.

The Crappy Emulator

There are a lot of restrictions. I first selected the Nexus4 device which comes with 2GB RAM, but the emulator doesn’t work if you specify more than 768MB RAM.

So I set it to 768MB RAM, and started the emulator. It took a whole 60 seconds to just load the OS. Fine. But the UI was even worse. It was so slow respond.

Would “Use Host GPU” option fix it?

I read somewhere that if you check “Use Host GPU” option, the UI becomes snappier. So I went into the Android Virtual Device I created before and did that. But that didn’t do any good.

Enabling Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator

So I searched the internet and found out that if you use Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator, you can make it snappier. This is how you enable it.

Launching Android SDK Manager

First you have to open Android SDK Manager. There is an icon for it at the root of the Android SDK you downloaded. But for some reason it would not launch for me. But there is a fix.

• Close the Eclipse IDE if you have it open.
• Open \sdk\tools\android.bat in a text editor. (Notepad for example)
• Search for “set java_exe=”
• There, enter the path where java.exe is installed. If you installed JRE to the default location, it would be at C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\java.exe. Put the path within quotation marks.
• Now it should look like this.

set java_exe=”C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\java.exe”

• Now save the android.bat file, and double click it to open Android SDK Manager.

 

Installing Intel x86 packages

In Android SDK Manager, select the following two options and click on Install Packages. It should be straightforward after that.

Now launch Android Development Environment (or Eclipse) and check the properties of your Android Virtual Device (or add a new one).

You will see that you can now select Intel Atom as the CPU.

However, if you try to launch the emulator after selecting Intel Atom as the CPU, it will still work as crappy as before. You will notice that there is an error shown in the console.

emulator: Failed to open the HAX device!
HAX is not working and emulator runs in emulation mode
emulator: Open HAX device failed

Installing Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager

Looks like there is still work to do. Now we have to install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. (HAXM).

Go to \sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and run IntelHaxm.exe to install Install HAXM.

However, for this to succeed, you have to have a CPU that supports Intel VT-x. You can check if your CPU supports VT-x using Intel Processor Identification Utility. Remember even if your CPU supports it, it might be disabled in BIOS/UEFI. So check there as well, and enable it.

Enjoy the speed

Now you are ready for action.

Open the Android Development Environment and in there go and add a new Virtual Device. For some reason, updating the existing Virtual Device didn’t work for me. From there, select Intel Atom as the CPU and rest of the settings as you please. I checked “Use GPU Host” option as well.

After that I launched the emulator. Woah! The difference was night and day. The emulator fully starts within 10 seconds. The UI is fluid, just as running inside the real hardware.

Now it is time to develop. :)

Yay! My iPhone 4S is snappy again.

When I bought my iPhone 4S almost 20 months ago, I straight away felt how fast it was compared to my old iPhone 3GS. But after a while it became slow. In fact, it got so slow that there have been times that I felt like throwing it out the window or dropping it on the floor and crushing it with my feet. I know, it would only make things worse, thus I controlled myself every time the thought occurred to me.

Things got worse with iOS 6 update. It would work well as soon as I restored or updated the OS, but eventually get slow.

When Evasi0n released the Jailbreak for iOS 6.1, I went ahead with the Jailbreak. I didn't feel that the phone got any slower, but the battery went down the hill. After a few months, I gave up the Jailbreak. But disappointingly, I didn't get better performance nor battery life. I only lost the Jailbreak tweaks that I really loved. At this point, I was using iOS 6.1.3, the latest as of this day.

Then WWDC2013 happened. iOS 7 was introduced and I managed to install the developer preview on my phone without paying for a developer account. (Click here to find out how to do it.) But it ran so horribly slow on my phone. Restarting fixed it for a certain degree, but it was slow - much slower than the slowness I talked about at the top of this post. People with iPhone 5's were not feeling the slowness. Sure, the iPhone 5 is twice as fast as mine, but if people didn't feel the slowness, that's either because it is not slow, or because people are numb. I wanted to believe it was the former. So what I did was, I cleared out all the junk from the phone.
・I had all 1000 pics from Photo streams and disconnected it from the phone.
・I removed all the photos there were in the camera roll.
That's all really. I had already removed the unnecessary apps and I only had the apps that I frequently used.

But it didn't get any faster. Not only that, it was crashing few of the apps that I really needed. One of them was the Pocasts app. Commuting without the Podcast app would be a nightmare. So I wanted to go back to iOS 6.

But I made a mistake this time. I could not restore the backup via iTunes, because the last backup was done from iOS 7 and it was incompatible with iOS 6's backup format. Yes, I believe the older backups were still there in the PC and I could have chosen one of them instead. I only remembered that the next day. But I do not regret what happened. I had to start over from the scratch, BUT for some reason, the phone is very snappy now. I think it was the junk that was in the backup that was causing the lag. I had all the SMS history and call history and the settings of apps that I don't use anymore all copied back to the phone. That junk must have been the cause of the slowness. I have been using the phone for 3 days and there isn't the slightest hint of it running slow. Sure, it is not iPhone 5, but I don't feel that it is laggy anymore. I'm pretty sure that it is not my mind playing tricks.

So what I am going to do from here onwards is, I'm going to keep my the call history clean, SMS history clean (only keep the ones that I want to keep, and delete the rest), sync only 50 emails, clean up the camera roll every day when I get back home and not connect to photo streams. Basically, I'm gonna keep the phone as clean as I can. I'm sure it will become an obsession eventually, but at least I will have a fast phone.

Windows 8 might boot fast, but it is damn slow to load the System Tray apps

I had been having this problem from the Release Preview days, but I thought Microsoft would fix it in the RTM. Windows would bootup fast and quickly go into the Metro environment, but the legacy system tray apps would load very slowly. Much much slowly compared to Windows 7. I even disabled few to make it quicker.

Apparently they haven’t fixed it in the RTM either. Maybe they are transferring the blame onto the app makers.

Biggest issue is, AutoHotKey would not start quickly. That is what I use for shortcut keys to launch apps because I do not wanna visit the start screen.

Note: Did you notice there are hardly any Metro apps present in my PC? LOL