What Does The Windows REFRESH Button Really Do?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- What does right-click-refreshing a Windows folder or desktop really do?
Does it have any sort of tangible benefit? Most importantly, why do we keep doing it over and over again?
Video Checkpoints:
0:00 Clever Intro
0:58 Curiosity
1:19 Misconceptions
1:44 TLDR
2:14 Efficient Rendering
3:28 Auto-Refresh
3:56 Manual Refresh Use Case
4:13 The Irony
4:39 Why Do People Needlessly Refresh?
5:47 Misconception Foundation
6:20 Existential Crisis
6:50 Uplifting Outro
#windows #microsoft - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Well, I sure didn't expect to have a small existential crisis at the end of a video about a niche OS feature
the message at the end was very hopeful, i'd say it was the opposite of an existential crisis
bruhhhh
fuccin same!
i mean it's a good message but nyot what i expected at 6 in the morning after staying up all nyight and clicking a vid on a refresh button xD
but it's welcomed uwu
yup
The line " We are here , might as well do something " is soo true 😅
That was a refreshing ending, 10/10
Budum tssss
Budum tssss
Budum tssss
Budum Tussss
*5 Second Explanation:* It refreshes your desktop icons.
Why did they make the video 7 minutes long? Did I miss something?
Thanks
but but but akchually 🤓🤓 you used the word you are trying to define in your definition.
what is gas - gas is a collection of gases.
You missed the joke
7:30 minute actually
Thanks, I was starting to wonder why tf this video is even a cinematic 7 minutes long video
Sometimes I watch something that I think gives me a glimpse into an alternate reality. This is one of those.
are you a mac user?
@@p33yushNope
encontrei te aqui omg
@@bernzrdo Olha! XD Boas!
Taskarii
I never used that button in 20 years
I use it everytime I turn on my PC, and I do it MULTIPLE TIMES
I only f5 websites 😂
I usually use the address bar button in windows explorer
I'm a programmer so i need that often
I didn't know it existed
Mac user
The reason why I do refresh/f5 on old machine is to make sure the computer is ready to run
If you refresh and your desktop doesn't immediately flash the icons, you know it's not ready to be used , so you refresh again and again , until it's immediate.
Only then you know it's ready and it's not gonna be laggy when you use it
I agree with this. In older days PC's specs weren't that strong. It used to take lots of time just to load entire OS like windows XP on HDD.
Doing refresh again and again was something you can doing while OS was being loaded. As you felt PC become responsive with time some people think pressing refresh button again and again made that change.
Also sometimes explorer.exe used to crash at that time. So it was still useful.
I think main use of refresh button was just to put a very light load on the PC(Entire system) and watching the results. If it can process it fast and easily then finally PC(Entire system) is ready to use. Also that Hourglass was great indicator to compare processing delay.
It same for us too same to same.
Refreshing does not free up your memory, though.
Yes thats the correct explaination. Which this youtuber doesnt know probably because he is 20 year old.
this makes more sense
5:43 fun fact. It used to make the character’s actions more effective on PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 because the buttons were pressure sensitive so devs could take advantage of that if they wanted to
Was looking for this comment!
I guess CHM is old enough to have been thinking of old controllers. I immediately flashed back to squeezing the heck out of NES controller buttons or pressing them hard and fast as iff sharp snappy presses would be different, knowing it wasn't, but feeling like it did anyway every time it would look like it actually worked.
Not PS1, pressure sensitive buttons were introduced in PS2
But that's only for controllers that have pressure sensitive buttons, which has never been on any nintendo consoles. Yeah, the gamecube controller had a analog triggers, but those aren't pressure sensitive. What I'm trying to say is, most controllers these days still don't have pressure sensitive buttons.
I would have never come to the idea that someone might think refresh makes it faster. I always thought it was a thing to not be so bored.
I thought it would change the birghtness because it was 1 time i clicked it the same time my gpu crashed (not a full crash but crash becuase i was over using it ) lol
It kinds of making it faster. When a process uses a lot of RAM (let's say a game), Windows will move other (unused) processes data into the swap file. Even after you close the game, sometimes the swapped data will not be moved back into the RAM. By refreshing the desktop/file manager you are forcing swapped data to be moved back to the RAM, thus making subsequent actions in Windows Explorer to feel faster.
Ok back in the day, your desktop icons wouldn’t “save” when you rearranged them. You had to spam refresh to get your changes to save.
this is why
It still happens to me sometimes in Win10; I save a file and it doesn't get arranged alphabetically until I click Refresh. It's especially noticeable in dialogue windows that appear when you click "Save" or "Open". The list of files/folders in them only updates after refreshing.
I dont expect that ending ... but I glad that is meaningful in someway
Cheesey
This feature is actually really useful for network mounts. If you make a change on a network share, it doesn't get automatically updated by Windows. This is mostly an enterprise thing though, but some hobbiests probably have similar setups.
For real! Sometimes my NAS is a lil slow when i update a file on a windows system and im on a linux system, sometimes i have to refresh manually but it tends to do it by itself
I literally press F5 each time I make a new folder
It's crazy that some people in the comments are saying they don't do that. I thought EVERYONE did that
Same
There is nothing everyone does.
i literally havent heard of people doing this until i watched this video
I thought it's crazy that anyone at all does that 😂
I never even knew it existed, well on the desktop anyway. I click the refresh button in the file explorer a lot, but that's only after I download a file, and I'm already in the folder that the file went to, and it doesn't show up.
You usually need to refresh when a download changes from a download file to the file you wanted if thr GUI is already open
this is the answer🎉🎉
Oooooh I got it now thanks
Very rarely I will have an icon not show up on my desktop that I know should be there. That's the only time I use this feature.
Ive seen people do this and i thought it was something to do with older hard disk drive PCs, By pressing the refresh button, you create a task making the hard disk power back up if it has gone into sleep mode. Still seems kinda pointless when you can turn off hard drive power off. For some reason it sort of infuriates me when I see people refreshing continuously as a "techy" person but this video helped me to understand that its more of a habit than the people actually thinking it does anything positive for their system.
In 30 years I've never used that button. Didn't even know it existed.
Right lol
Yeah right
Gen z sees it they click😊
I find it hard to believe that you used a computer for 30 years and NEVER right-clicked anywhere.
@@Fr0zenPeanut been right clicking for 30 years and ignoring that button
File Explorer doesn't always update the desktop with what's been deleted or not, even when using Windows 7. So since then I've refreshed the desktop with F5 just to make sure everything is in it's place. I have never thought that it was going to make the system "faster".
To counter the points in the video, analog face buttons exist for some PS2/PS3 games, so pushing buttons harder or softer is required. Another is motion control, tilting the controller thinking you're driving better can be useful when the controller has a Gyroscope. Like the Steam Controller, which I use the tilt bindings for driving games, lol (works surprisingly well).
Push buttons around the house in cheap appliances can wear out over time, requiring multiple presses (worn out contact). So it's not just a syndrome but an actual solution in case a button is actually not responding to input.
I only use it in the download folder when the downloaded file doesn't show up
I only use the refresh button to get rid of the dotted lines around a desktop icon when they won't go away on their own.
Omg, I completely forgot about that; thanks for that bit of Windows XP nostalgia.
Same. And ONLY for that
Is this a made up problem?
i do that all the time legit idk why i do it but i just do
I do it all the time and I have no idea why. This is not a made up problem. A lot of people do it and can’t stop. It is the weirdest thing.
@@HuMan-bEing132 are you sure it's not just some sort of OCD?
I used to do it for at least 2 years after upgrading from win7 to win10 but i don't do it currently at all. But 2 years is a lot of time
@@eboubaker3722 I still do it in Windows 11. It’s like playing with the fidget toy, you know?
May Allah (S.W.T.) bestow upon you His Blessings and Guidance; Ameen.
I use it daily bz windows is too slow to realise that the downloaded stuff is no longer downloading and the whole file is there.
Exactly. although it may not work for downloaded files, but in many other cases when the file is directly saved using the Windows' own dialogs, it will auto refresh itself.
For me I believe if does refresh lot it open any file quick than rather we don't does it too even write anything in the hard drive even read too fast.
As I mainly use Linux alongside Windows dual boot for gaming, I pretty much never use that button. I know it just refreshes the icons in the desktop and folders and does nothing else. It used to be useful in Windows XP when PCs were much slower than now, but it's pretty much obsolete in my opinion.
It's not really obsolete because of stuff like git for example
it doesn't make your pc faster in any way
its sole purpose is just refreshing files if they're not shown through GUI
i've seen one of my relatives do this and i never truly understood why aside from thinking it was something related to older windows versions, which also escalates to the said relative telling me not to use a desktop background nor more than 1 monitor as it causes performance problems - i believe them but i honestly don't think it's that much of an issue. the only thing i seem to do is pressing harder on my keyboard in racing games, thinking i'll steer tighter
on older systems, it can be a strain on the system to output to two monitors. now-a-days it doesn't cause quite as much of a problem.
@@maliciousfry right i wonder what m3 air engineers have to say
@@elmalleablewe have created the must powerful most efficient chip you could on a laptop.
also - it can't show more than 2 video output. coz f u that's why
@@siliconhawk9293 go love somebody. why so much anger
i almost died at "in order to render it's gooey"... 💀
I'm a nerd so don't spam 🤓🤓👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆
It's gui (graphical user interface)
@@TechJackPlus the closed captions didn't spell it GUI so maybe that was the lol. or perhaps OP genuinely didn't know what a GUI was, no idea why they'd be watching if they didn't have basic computer knowledge though.
@@TechJackPlus like icky sticky ( disgusting sticky stuff ) lol
literally never spammed refresh on my desktop
at the age of 9 around 12 years ago, back when my family had a windows xp as the OS on the family computer, i remember my cousin telling me once that the refresh button exists and ever since then i've had that issue with pressing it multiple times because he told me that spamming it would be more beneficial than pressing it once
Windows XP users spreading misinformation as usual
@@LinuxPlayer9 What convinced you that i am lying?
@@ros9764who are you
@@LinuxPlayer9 I'm sorry? I thought you were responding to my message about windows XP
I didn't even know that there was a refresh button when you right click on your desktop and I've used computers for 30+ years.
Because there isn't a Refresh button. There is however a Refresh menu-item.
@@I.____.....__...__🤓🤓
How's that even possible?
I used to watch this channel in 2016-17 then it suddenly dropped from my feed. I mostly forgot about this channel while still being subscribed. Today this video showed on top of my feed and your voice brought back so many memories. Anyways thanks for the content in a way your videos pushed me to study computer science and I will be getting my masters in computer science in the next few months. Thanks :)
The crosswalk button syndrome is like me closing and opening a video over and over again to skip the ad for free
Or just get Brave browser instead of wasting your time doing this...
When I had a low-end PC, I did it to "wake up the system". Basically put some pressure onto it, so it activates all of the processes faster.
I got so focused as this video went from being technical to philosophical. Beautiful interpretation and really unexpected. Much interesting.
In my humble beginnings with computers in 2008, I constantly refreshed the desktop. It slowly died off and I no longer do it. My dad however still does it and tells me to refresh it when I'm doing something on his computer.
I wasn't prepared for that ending
I never thought it made anything faster. Pushing the traffic light button does actually kind of work. After all, if you push the button a second time, the time interval between your last press and the light turning green is reduced. If you keep pressing, eventually one press will be your closest press before the light turns green. I do use F5 or the refresh button or click the current folder in the address bar to reload the view often, but not for no reason. If you are for example in "This PC" and you look at the drive space used on each partition, the bars don't update automatically. If you are installing something it will for example keep saying "1GB free", but after hitting F5 it actually suddenly says 500MB free, and again and it says 100MB free. On MacOS there is no refresh button, but the disk space is constantly updated and can be watched live in activity monitor or the info panel of the partition. On Windows I have also often needed refresh since sometimes there is a bug or something that causes Explorer to fail to refresh at all. Creating a folder doesn't make it show. If you refresh with F5, your folder is immediately named "New folder", if you click the current folder in the address bar, the folder name is still highlighted so you can type in it. This indicates that there are also multiple types of refreshes in Windows, the F5 does a full refresh of the contents, while clicking the current directory in the address bar in Explorer appears to do the same refresh it should do automatically. Refreshing in Windows is useful and often necessary for certain tasks although a regular user probably doesn't do anything where refreshing is necessary. MacOS doesn't really have a refresh option, everything just works automatically.
Refresh will prompt Explorer to update its settings like icon sizes and positions and write it to the registry, so I always use it after moving icons on the desktop so if Explorer crashes, it restores them on restart. Also, every time a weird glitch I keep getting breaks a bunch of different things in Windows, stops updating things on its own, so filenames can get corrupted and objects can be invalid (eg moved but still visible in their original location or not showing up after being moved).
Refreshing file explorer doesn't change your settings btw. I understand what you are saying but honestly, windows will be able to update its cache ect. by itself without input from the user.
Sometimes when I empty my trash bin and always when I delete all of the contents of a folder but leave the folder on the desktop, the icon does not change. I have to hit refresh _twice_ before it will change.
I only use the refresh option on occasion when I'm moving a lot of icons or files around and I can't find something afterwards. Works exactly as intended then. Interesting to learn that some people refresh compulsively though.
Okay, that ended up more philosophical than expected. The actual purpose is this: The graphical shell (explorer.exe) "subscribes" to the currently open folders (including the desktop) to be notified when files are created, changed, renamed or removed in the file system, to know when to update its display of the icons. This subscription (a "file system watcher") has always had bugs and corner cases and doesn't always trigger when files change - one example being a browser that renames a temporary file once a download completes, another being files getting renamed from the command prompt. So when you, as the user, know (or suspect) that files have changed but the shell hasn't caught it yet, you ask it to refresh explicitly so you can work with the new files in the graphical view. For the desktop, it very rarely makes sense. It never occurred to me that people would click this believing it did anything more than that, or for stress relief. Users are weeeeird...
In 30 years of using Windows, I can't recall a specific need to refresh the frame buffer. Maybe that was the case with Windows 3.x on DOS, but then, a corrupted screen was a good sign that it was time to reboot.
I literally use it once in a blue moon. Last year I was on my friend’s computer. I saved a file from Chrome onto the desktop and it didn’t show up. Refresh make it appear. Thanks, refresh!
I'm sorry for Interrupting sentences , he is 82 years old, he is very nervous, he is old and old, it's all normal to buy a mobile phone for touching and talking on the web for 00 thousand things. They advise me because the father of a mobile phone shop a while ago used to buy a cheap New York phone. Is there something wrong with this age???
I used it a few times when the gui wasn't updated but the most i use it is when that right click menu is displayed over other windows and it doesn't go away by clicking somewhere.
One thing that confuses me to this day is, why do people use the desktop? I personally haven't ever used the desktop in years. I just always have my browser in the background of all my other programs, and I find that the start menu, search, and the taskbar are much much faster than searching through a grid of tiles. In fact, I've found that putting stuff in the documents folder is much better than on the desktop.
I never did that. Never saw a reason to do that on my pc.
you must be young
@@arzentvm 39 by the end of the year
The world is sure weird.... refresh button pressing and many comments reinforcing they do that is to just cope with anxiety 😂😂
The Ending of this video was gold ✨️
Totally worth the watch
This video is so artfully done, I would like to refresh and watch it again sometime soon.
Legend says that the third time you Refresh, your CMOS battery is being cleared, and the fourth time, it's your browser history..
We press refresh to gauge the responsiveness of the system.
Like when you doubt internet connection and refresh the page to test it.
Aha! Here's the reason to scratch my itch!
my nerd brain didn’t expect to be dumbfounded by a cinematic masterpiece
But that's not enough reason to click on a refresh button right after booting your pc. Your browser also has a refresh button. Do you refresh every site as soon as you open it?
The only time I use a folder refresh button is when I changed files on a different device (network folders) or in a different window. In these cases I know the files should have changed but the file Explorer doesn't update the file list (dolphin is really extreme with this). For websites it's the same I use the refresh button if something went wrong or I expect changes to the content that happened externally.
The main idea of the video and the outro were 2 completely seperate videos
On older OS-es (XP) that button actually did something as a side effect. CPU cache(es) exists, and HDDs too. Old PCs would stop the HDD in idle because why not if its in idle. By pressing the refresh button a LOT of things happen at once. Like file access which already caches some things into RAM and Cache in case it was dropped and also it ramps up the HDD minimizing latency between your new few actions. I would say it unintentionally makes everything a bit snappier for a little bit.
Your intro is Fantastic... 😍😍😍
I really liked it... 😊
i know it's simplification, but don't you think the ui/fps analogy is a bit too off?
imagine you are moving icons' positions around on the desktop: the visuals are updated then, but that's not what refresh does. refresh synchronizes the state of the directory your operating is aware of (that's the "cache") with the underlying file system. this is in particular important if your view shows a remote location, which, when changed by other users for example, doesn't push the updates to your os.
i didn't even know it existed
I got that compulsion as a kid because a cousin of mine had told me that it made the PC faster after booting. I get how someone could have come to that conclusion though, because it did create an illusion of that, but it was really just a confirmation bias. The habit got so ingrained in me that sometimes I still do it even though I know there isn't much of a point.
I learn this from school everytime we go to the computer lab. The teacher always ask the student to hit refresh 3 times after turning the computer on.
Lol 😂
I didn't even knew such a button existed
5:36 the dualshock 2 actually had pressure sensitive buttons which change the action based on whether we pressed them softly or hard
iphone used to have pressure sensitive screen which change the action based on whether we pressed them softly or hard
@@_kitaes_So did Apple Watch. MacBook trackpads and Magic Trackpad still do
@@TheRenegade... thank you for useless information
@@_kitaes_ Useless to you, maybe, but not useless to everyone
My monitor makes funny colors when i press it hard enough
I've used that button when adding a file on desktop did nothing, after refresh it was displayed
Man that is a nice way to make this kind of video
Starting with a story
Ending with a message
And existential crisis in between
going from tech to philosophy to motivation and anything in between is very rare in one video
3:16 So that's why in Windows XP you had sometimes an icon with a white square/weird color or even (happened) the icons gets duplicated to other shortcuts around it!
Windows XP? I swear I encountered this even on Win10.
I didn't even know that compulsively clicking on the refresh button was a thing
the ending was so impactful
Right after this video, I minimized the window, went to desktop to refresh couple of times. So satisfying.
So on windows 10 while downloading an archive with chrome, while also unpacking another archive using the right click context menu using WinRAR, it quite often doesn't delete the part file of the download when the download is complete. If the archive finishes unpacking within a short period of time as the download completing, it doesn't always render the new files. It's a very specific and unique situation. But it's a pretty solid example that refresh fixes. Now my compulsion is to refresh 3 times, but that's more because smacking f5 in old Firefox used to do a full refresh ignoring cached data, and I picked up that habit back in college.
It does also help if a folder is say, updated in a share, and windows hasn't seen it yet.
For me its some kind of question to windows: "Are You ready? Are you listening?"
Because if you do a right-click and it takes very long to show the refresh button in the context menu, I know the system is not reactive because it is on heavy load.
5:33 The PS2 had controller face buttons that where pressure sensitive but not a lot of games utilized this feature, racing games primarily used this function.
I like how the video went from technological factor to an entire philosophical chaos
Your philosophy in the last sentence won my heart.
Came for technical knowledge, left with wisdom
That is the best video i see in the last 5 year 😅
You are the best ❤
I know what this button does.
The Refresh button serves to display changes in a place where they were not immediately displayed after the changes themselves
For example: you copy paste a file into some direction. If it doesn't display or show up, you press F5 key/Refresh button.
Then you can see it
I personally use it to refresh explorer.exe for it to show changes or in browser to resfresh the TH-cam video to not see ads
Well, I have a Windows 11 VM on my Macbook withvsome folders shared between both OSes. Whenever I move/copy/rename/whatever a file in MacOS it doesn't show up while having that folder open in my Windows 11 machine, those changes won't show up until I clock on refresh or reopen the folder
Fascinating video
I always assumed it closes and reopens the program, that's it so it starts processing from the beginning and cleaning memory
for me (back when i was new to win XP) , its just a way to check if the pc is still running task in the background. when i refresh and it lags or show loading icon it means it still doing its thing and i wont bother it for a while. and then later on it became a habit to right click and refresh(or hold F5) on desktop every boot before doing anything on pc. lol
I think I do this to ensure my PC is at its full potential by judging the time it takes to press the mouse button and the actual refreshing of the icons happening.
Its longer when you have just booted up
tbh your video is so good and well scripted with best hooks. But it's also amazing that you went from refresh button to real life syndromes.
Back when I had Windows XP I refreshed when I was being indecisive about what to do, 2-3 times I think, never had any issues with the screen or icons though.
Now on Windows 10, I use it when I see a duplicate icon, usually happens after a resolution change or creating a shortcut or too much messing around with the GPU settings, getting a portion of my desktop blacked out, refresh fixes that.
Why is this informational video so calming.....
You’ve just given me a new tick, thanks 😃
5:34 Fun fact: Controllers actually have pressure sensor in main buttons. Few games used it, but they were there.
An example is Metal Gear Solid 3. The AK-47 would only fire if you pressed Square button HARD.
Thanks for the video
but what is the music on @4:40 ?
my computer has stopped automatically updating when i put a file somewhere, i have to click refresh every time even if i dragged the file into the window i'm looking at
i knew many people who thinks refresh speeds up computers, i did believe that too but after knowing what it actually does, i got rid of that habit quickly, now i never refresh icons mindlessly
I've been doing this since win7. I feel like doing several refresh after bootup somewhat makes the system run a bit more stable til the next boot
The only time I've ever refreshed my desktop is when I've changed the Registry value controlling whether the Windows version number is painted on the desktop. That allows me to see the change without logging out or rebooting.
Do we press F5? Speak in the first person singular. I might press the crosswalk button multiple time if it lacks activation feeback, either with lights or tactile. They do sometimes work. The pedestrian light might not change if there are no pedestrians giving cars turning left more time. Sometimes the buttons, like Stop in buses, are worn and you can't be sure they have registered and aren't broken.
On WinXp the icons might not rearrange to the desired sort order, alphabetically or whatever until refresh. On WinNT6 the whole list updates (PCs are faster now). So the engine really doesn't save anything. They removed GDI acceleration from WinNT6, making huge listboxes in classic UI terribly slow. Gotta do the DWM and modern aero stuff.
Pressure on the keyboard while gaming is a real thing. Binary buttons just don't feel natural.
honestly i think of it as a manual way to worm up the refreshing rate before doing anything, also sometimes when the device is stressed it takes the fps down so it's a way to redirect the resources back to the refreshing rate
or at least that's what i think of as a reasoning, it could really be just me justifying a weird habit
i did not even know there was suchc an option if i right click on my desktop. but i did figure out if i hold f5, the icons disapper mostly. they flicker a bit.
I dont think I've ever even paid attention to that button, or even known it existed until I saw the thumbnail of this video.
This video might not refresh my computer, but it certainly refreshed my mind 👍
You reminded me of a question i had, does windows renders basic gui elements on cpu instead of gpu?
It is definitely like a addiction. When i got mac in my work place, it was so frustrating not to refresh. I refreshed few times on the PC my colleague was using and then used my PC..
Sounds like ocd or anxiety
That ending was not expected.
Tutorial TH-camrs in 2011 used to use this button every 5 seconds
Ending lines hit hard!
how do you do these audio graphs that react to your voice? what software are you using for that?