In article , David Taylor
wrote:

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

Likely cause - reading all the files in the directory.

doubtful, but if so, that's an incredibly bad design. there is no
reason to scan the file system on every launch and certainly not after
a brief gap.

what's more likely is that the drive spun down and has to spin back up,
which is why the activity light blinks.

Possible fix - upgrade to a faster HD or faster OS.
Can you try an SATA attached HD? Perhaps get an SATA card if your HD is
still the old 80-pin connector.

that won't matter if the drive spun down.

if the problem is something else, it won't make much of a difference
either because if the computer is old enough to not have sata at all,
then it's too slow to benefit much from adding it.

Win-10 does a lot of caching, providing it has enough memory. Suggest
an 8 GB or 16 GB RAM PC for maximum benefit.

any app that relies on the operating system to cache files or uses the
file system directly is fundamentally broken.

XP is well past its sell-by date now.

yep, as is the hardware on which it's running.