Windows ships with a very functional search tool, but to take advantage of its full functionality and speed you have to have the notorious “Indexing Service” running in the background. As you may know, this service can be a beast in terms of resource consumption. While disabling this service doesn’t break the Windows search functionality, it does severely cripple it. For an alternative, check out voidtools’ Everything.
Pointing out the biggest advantage from their FAQ:
How long will it take to index my files?
“Everything” only uses file and folder names and generally takes a few seconds to build it’s database. A fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (about 20,000 files) will take about 1 second to index.
1,000,000 files will take about 1 minute.
In addition to an “instant” (relatively speaking) index, Everything offers several other attractive features:
- Regular expression support.
- Minimal resource usage.
- Free
If you currently use the Windows search tool or another tool, Everything is definitely worth taking a look at.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
I installed this about two weeks ago. Pretty instant and works well. It literally lists just about everything - even mp3 titles and I`ve already used it to locate items I’d misplaced or couldn’t quite remember the right file name. Very good and just so damn quick! I did have Google Desktop, but it seemed a bit of a drain, so replaced it with “Everything”.