Hello from the year 2020.
I found out that it is a Google Drive sync issue (the product was renamed to “Backup and Sync from Google” meanwhile).
You can test it yourself:
- Click on the Google Drive icon (in the system tray), hit the tree dots and select "Pause".
- Go to Windows Explorer and rename the files.
You will see that the file renaming bug is not happening anymore.
I can explain how Unicode is being handled, but I cannot really directly answer your question. I have had slowness for the first write, but once that is done, it gets fast again...
Unicode is composed of what we call planes. Planes are 256 characters. In many situations, fonts will handle one plane, in part to avoid very large files but also because it is enough for many languages (English, French, German...). However, Asian languages make use of larger fonts that cover multiple planes. For a complete Japanese character set you'd get, if I'm correct, about 10 planes. Chinese is more (especially traditional Chinese!)
When rendering with such fonts, you have to select the corresponding font (if one font is not enough to handle all the characters, the operating system switches between fonts for you; that's under the hood, but it happens.) That is time consuming. Plus, the first time the system writes in that font, it needs to load it from disk. Asian languages having large fonts, that takes time too.
Finally, and that is probably more likely what you are encountering, the characters (or glyphs) are generally more complex. That means more time to render the characters. Although that could be done by the video board with OpenGL/D3D, for fonts, that is not so good. You lose a lot of quality (although font quality under MS-Windows...) So it is most often done by the processor.
One last note, although I would really doubt that is a concern, by default Win7 makes the window edges semi-transparent. It could be that adds to the problem. This part of the rendering, however, is most certainly done with accelerated 2D/3D functions on your video board.
Best Answer
CreeDorofl and others. The issue is perfectly described by CreDorofl, when he tries to rename part of the filename, the whole name is selected in a split of a second, usually faster then you can react. This makes impossible to change any part of the file name other then the whole name. The reason is of course the refresh. You are trying to change file name in the folder that contains some other file that is changing (you are downloading the file into the same folder and download did not finish) or the file you are trying to change is being moved. Wait until download/moving is finished and you will be able to change whatever you want. You can also try a little test: go to any other folder (that does not contain file being downloaded/moved and try to change names (part of the names) of any file, you should be able to do it without problem.