« KTM cutting out | Main | Peaceful Hills »

May 8, 2016

I hate Windows 7 So Much There Aren't Words

So, the main thing I hate about Windows 7 is that the morons up in Redmon managed to break something that used to work perfectly. Somehow, they have fucked up the thumbnail cache so bad that no one can get their thumbnails to appear. There are countless posts on this issue, with many different solutions. But, as the old adage goes, "if there are many cures for a disease then, sadly, there is no cure."

My problem is that the thumbnails in question are on mapped drives. Mapped drives are as follows:

S:\ Synology Diskstation NAS
T:\ Buffalo Terastation NAS
W:\ WD ShareSpace NAS

I don't get thumbnails on any of these NAS devices.

I'm also not getting thumbnails on my local drives:
D:\My Pictures
C:\2016\04

I seriously want to strangle those stupid dolts up in Redmond, Washington. See...this used to work. And, if it didn't work, you could just right-click and select "Refresh Thumbnails", and it would fix the thumbnails. But don't you know those dimwits in Redmond weren't happy with that. They had to go and screw it up.

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-force-refresh-thumbnails-of-images-and-videos-in-explorer-folders/

"In Windows XP, this was built right into Explorer. You could right click any image or video and click Refresh thumbnail. Unfortunately, this feature was lost with Windows Vista as it redesigned the way thumbnails are stored. It now stores them to a centralized cache for images and videos stored locally on the hard drive. So if a thumbnail fails to generate for some file or it is showing an incorrect thumbnail, there is no built-in way to refresh it."

So, let's start here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/10797-thumbnail-cache-clear-reset.html

Windows - R
cleanmgr
Select drive C
Click OK.

"Disk cleanup is calculating how much space you will be able to free on OS (C:) This may take a few minutes to complete."

OK. I scrolled down and selected Thumbnails. Says it will free up 3.0 Mb. Woohoo!
I said OK.
Disk Cleanup will now clear the thumbnail cache and close.

So, it went away. I can't tell anything different, of course. I certainly don't have any thumbnails now.

Now, the second part:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/10797-thumbnail-cache-clear-reset.html

To Clear and Reset Thumbnail Cache using a BAT File
1. Click on the Download button below to download the BAT file below.

OK. I downloaded the bat. Ran it. I still have no thumbnails. Nice.

Now, I'm creating a new entry in the Registry which will disable thumbnail cache, in theory:

http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/994/

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
Advanced]
Value Name: DisableThumbnailCache
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = enabled, 1 = disable cache)

Open your registry and find or create the key below.

Create a new DWORD value, or modify the existing value, called "DisableThumbnailCache" and set it according to the value data below.

Exit your registry; you may need to restart or log out of Windows for the change to take effect.

So, I rebooted. Not clear what it did, but I still don't have thumbnails. So there is that...

The other thing that I do is I go to Windows Explorer, and hit Tools - Folder Options - View - Display File icon on Thumbnails. I have no idea what this means, or what it does, but I check it on or off, periodically, always hoping for the best, mind you.

But this doesn't help, at this point. Still no thumbnails on my C or D drive. Nice.

Apparently, there is a free 3rd party app:

A third party free app called Thumbnail Refresh Tool lets you refresh thumbnails.

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-force-refresh-thumbnails-of-images-and-videos-in-explorer-folders/

Download Thumbnail Refresh Tool from this page.

But the tool isn't there. Nice. And the articles I see are all about how to uninstall the virus called "Thumbnail Refresh Tool"...so I 'm not going there.

http://www.freewaregenius.com/how-to-fix-missing-thumbnail-previews-for-image-files-in-windows/

1. Check Windows Explorer Settings to see if thumbnails are disabled
1.1. Open any folder in and click ALT+T on the keyboard, then select 'Folder Options'

Folder Options Screenshot1

1.2. Click on the 'view' tab. Make sure that the checkbox next to 'Always show icons, never thumbnails' is unchecked. If it is checked, go ahead and uncheck it.

Oh Lord that fixed it. Thank God.

I now have thumbnails on my C: drive and my D: drive. And my S: drive.


Posted by Rob Kiser on May 8, 2016 at 9:19 PM

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)


NOTICE: IT WILL TAKE APPROX 1-2 MINS FOR YOUR COMMENT TO POST SUCCESSFULLY. YOU WILL HAVE TO REFRESH YOUR BROWSER. PLEASE DO NOT DOUBLE POST COMMENTS OR I WILL KILL YOU.