Windows 10: How Long Does It Take You to Open Devices & Printers?

Happy to hear that Devices and Printers opens quickly for you.
But what we need to discover is why it works for you but not for others.

 

I use Edge, also I have put the settings button in taskbar.
Also I only do one click
So when I go to settings one click opens it
Then one click Device
Printer and Scanner it opens straight away if I need to look at it if something goes wrong

 

0,5-1s here, running on SSD and invoking it from Classic shell. I also think I have network discovery disabled.

How many printers do you have and are any of those networked? I have found time increases a lot for networked printers.

 

There are two ways to see you devices and printers:
1. Control panel / Hardware and sound / Devices and printers - this can be slow. Helps for me to turn off network discovery.
2. Settings (modern) / Devices - this is instant

OP was referring to Control panel as I understand, so don't mix this up (this part isn't meant for you TV2) *Smile.

 

Exactly AndreTen! Thanks

From Settings > Devices my machine is also instant.

In the modern Devices window you do not see everything in one place. You need to click once to see printers, click again to see connected devices, etc. Therefore I prefer the old Devices & Printers (which you can also set up for one-click access if you preferred).

I do a lot of PC to PC work here, so turning off Network Discovery would not be a good fix for me.
But as long as I know what it is that is causing the problem then that would answer the question.

 

Agree! I also prefer the old style Devices, but don't use them so frequently, that it would bother me too much, if they open in 1 or 10 seconds (admit, it is annoying).

I think, we need some network specialist here for instruction, how to fine tune system for fast reaction. This is beyond me.

 

And anyway, I do want my computer & printer to be shared on my home network. Just don't need to see these in Devices & Printers when I can use the Network folder to see them... 7-8 seconds is still slow, but better than 20

 

Just wanted to thank AndreTen for his tip about SETTINGS > DEVICES being instant. Wasn't aware of that option and yes, it's instant for me too. Thanks!

FWIW, this is on a Dell XPS-8900, i7, 16GB ram that I recently purchased. It was taking about a minute+ for "Devices & Printers" to display. I do have a SSD for my C partition with all data on a D drive. With tips from the web I changed Bluetooth in services.msc from manual to auto and D&P displays in 8 seconds now. Still too long for me when I was used to D&P displaying in a couple of seconds on my previous Win7, i5, 8GB ram, home-built PC (that died).

I'm wondering, do folks who are having 8 seconds or longer D&P display, all have Dell PCs? And folks who have D&P display in 3-4 seconds have non Dell PCs? I assume all are running Win10 since this in the tenforums.

 

No, it's slow on home built desktop PC which has the OS on a SSD.

 

I have yet to come across a Windows 10 computer (50+) that opens Devices & Printers quickly through the Control Panel.

 

No problems here. This old computer of mine is too old for new tricks *Wink Opens Devices thru Control panel... in sec.

 

Opens instantly here. Not sure it helps but open the group policy and go to Computer Policy/System/Device Installation and enable "Prevent device metadata retrieval from the internet" which will also stop Windows from offering enhanced icons and hope it might speed it up

 

Spoke too soon. Powered off my XPS-8900 last night. Today after boot up, it took 61 seconds to display "Devices & Printers". Same as before. Changing the bluetooth setting is not a fix and I'm going to set it back to "manual" where it was.

Windows 10?...... It's for the birds. So many small problems... Bah humbug!

 

Hmmm, since "SETTINGS > DEVICES" displays instantly on "all" PCs, but "Devices & Printers" takes a long time on many PCs, it seems that it is a deliberate decision by Microsoft to not support "Devices & Printers" properly. Guess they want folks to adopt the Fisher Price icons in SETTINGS > DEVICES rather than the nice picture icons in D&P.

If I'm missing the point, I welcome explanations of this phenomena.

Thanks for your input Steve,

 

Hi shimshom,

gpedit does not exist in my version of Windows 10 Home. Googling:

=== The option is changed by changing this registry entry key "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Device Metadata!PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork" from "0" in "1". ===

"Device Metadata" does not exist in my Win10 Home registry.

Thanks,