When I installed Windows 10 on one of my LGA775 machines, the first thing that immediately annoyed me was that the PC seemed slow and unresponsive. And this was with a 3GHz quad core processor, 8GB RAM, and running off an SSD. Gaming and application performance was ok, and benchmarks returned expected results, but simple tasks like renaming a new folder or deleting items were unbearingly slow. And in fact, when looking at the Task Manager, it showed that Explorer actually became unresponsive for a few seconds when renaming or deleting files.  I tried all the usual solution attempts like checking the disk for errors, partition alignment, removing shell extensions, changing various folder options, resetting the folder options back to default, installing Windows updates – none of those proposed solutions made any difference. I already started to suspect that the cheap DRAM-less SSD I was using was to blame, and vowed to never buy such a thing again. Until I read something that pointed to the Quick Access as a possible culprit.

Now the proposed solution of disabling recent and commonly used items in Quick Access did not help, but it did lead me to note the presence of Floppy Drive A: in the Quick Access item list. My motherboard had a floppy drive controller built in, but no floppy drive was actually connected to it, and yet Floppy Drive A: was present when opening This PC, and in the Quick Access item list.

Noticing that Explorer became unresponsive when I right clicked on the obviously missing Drive A: in This PC, I decided to try removing the floppy drive from the Quick Access item list. So Right Click on Floppy Disk Drive (A:) in the Quick Access section, wait about 10 seconds for Explorer to become responsive again, and select Unpin from Quick Access. And surprise – the unresponsiveness is gone! The system is now fast and responsive like you would expect from running off an SSD. No more pausing and delays when renaming or deleting files. And I can continue to use DRAM-less SSD’s again without worrying that they’re complete garbage that cause unresponsiveness.