Member Avatar for J☼E

Speed Up Those Searches Now!

Windows can create an index of the files on your computer to speed up searching.

  • Open Search, then choose Change preferences and then With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
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A quick, practical add-on to the thread: the indexer maintains a searchable database of file names, properties and—optionally—file contents. That makes repeated or wide-ranging searches much faster, but building and keeping that database up to date uses disk I/O, CPU and some space while it runs. It’s a trade-off rather than a magic free speed boost.

When it’s worth enabling: if you routinely search large sets of documents, email stores (Outlook), source trees or project folders, an index pays back the cost quickly. If you rarely search or you only have a few hundred files, leaving it off is reasonable — exactly the point and raised. Laptop users on slow disks or machines with tight CPU/memory should be cautious.

Tuning tips to get the benefit without the pain: limit indexed locations to the folders you actually search (user Documents, Desktop, mail archives) and exclude big media, backups and build/output folders; index file contents only for text/document types you care about and keep everything else as “properties only”; let the initial build finish (it can take hours on large drives) and rebuild the index if results look wrong or incomplete; if indexing interferes with responsiveness, drop the indexer’s process priority or confine indexing to off-hours. These steps keep the database small and the background cost low.

Practical test: enable indexing for a few key folders, use it for a week, then compare search times and system responsiveness — expand or roll it back based on that experience. Thanks to @J☼E for prompting the tip: it’s very useful when tuned, and overkill when it isn’t.

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Member Avatar for suRoot

this is only realling worth doing either with drives that arn't added to or MASSIVE amounts of of files...

Member Avatar for Dani

Yes, I leave this off. I don't believe I turned it off that way though. I think I used Tweak-XP ;)

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