Friday, February 12, 2010

My Computer opens slowly and you get a flashlight icon

I had a user complain that her Windows XP computer starting running slow, and whenever she opened My Computer she would see a flashlight moving back and forth, but the drives either wouldn't show up or would take a long time. At first I expected it to be some type of spyware or adware, but that wasn't it. A quick Google after ruling that out brought me to the solution. Windows Image Acquisition, which is a service that can run in the background to make sure your computer is ready to recognize something plugged into it, such as a camera. Disabling supposedly solves the problem, and it worked for this particular user. For more details, here's how to do it yourself:

1. Right-click on the My Computer icon and select Manage
2. Expand Services and Applications
3. Click on Services
4. In the window to the right, scroll down until you find "Windows Image Acquisition". Right-click on it and go to Properties
5. Change the Startup Type to "Disabled" and click OK
6. Close the Computer Management window that you have open

Now go and give the My Computer icon a click and see if it still gives you a flashlight icon. In the case I dealt with, as soon as the service was disabled, clicking on My Computer brought up the system drives as quickly as it should have. Hopefully you have the same result.

3 comments:

orangeweezel said...

Thank you! I searched for this problem on Google, found your site and tried it. After several months I finally got it fixed. Thank you for taking the time to write this!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Man ! All that time it was just this one stupid thing ... only on this one computer too . Thanks Again !

Anonymous said...

I just wanted to chime in and say that this solved the problem for me as well (My Computer taking forever).