Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Windows File Search SUCKS”.
You know what really ruptures my hot pocket when, even though you have a fast pc, you type in a search string in the file explorer that progress bar inches towards the end. And then it just stops for enough time for you to just go and find the thing the old-fashioned way. So what gives oh and we’re aware? There’S another windows, search that also sucks, but that’ll be topic for another video. It turns out that, although the windows file search can be immensely frustrating, it’s actually just trying to be thorough. You see by default windows searches, not only the file names but also the file contents, and even if you have a really fast nvme ssd you’re, essentially asking the operating system to go through and examine nearly every byte on the drive and with an individual drive. Potentially holding trillions of bytes, this can take a really long time, of course, as frustrated as we get at microsoft.
Sometimes they aren’t stupid and so they’ve tried to mitigate the problem with a feature called indexing. You’Ve probably heard this term if you’ve ever read about the way online search engines work as they store information on web pages in a big index, so that google searches only take a few fractions of a second instead of hours. Similarly, windows indexes the contents of your hard drive or ssd, while your computer is at idle.
So whenever you go to search for a file, it can bring up index results very quickly. So why can searches still take so long to complete, then what’s going on? Is that, although index results can come up in a few seconds after you type in your query, windows does not index your whole system by default, notably the users folder containing personal documents. Downloads and data such as saved games will get indexed, but the vast majority of the remainder of your drive will not additionally, many file types, don’t have their contents indexed by default. Either windows does index the contents of text files such as those with a txt or docx extension, but won’t bother with most other file types which can make finding what you’re looking for even more tricky once windows finishes searching through the index.
It will then turn through all the non-indexed information on the disk, which the search feature has little to no advanced knowledge of. Hence the hugely long wait times when searching large sections of your drive. Fortunately, the default settings can be tweaked to your liking, bring up the control panel and click indexing options then modify where you can choose as many folders or drives as you’d like to add to the index.
You can also click advanced, then file types. If there are certain kinds of files where you’d like to have windows index, the entire contents, there’s even an option to delete and rebuild the index if you’re continually experiencing issues with the search feature, there’s also another way to speed things up. When you actually run a search in file explorer click view, then options, then the search tab you’ll see an option. That’S on by default to always search non-indexed file. Contents.
Clearing this option will stop the file search feature from looking through every byte in the selected folder or drive, which is often the culprit of the search progress bar seeming to hang near the end, but it may cause you to miss some relevant results. So pick your poison. Now it may sound like an even better idea, is to just index everything on the whole drive, including the file contents, but beware that this can take up a lot of system resources if you don’t have a fast pc and when you actually. Finally, do go and run a search; it can take a long time for windows to search through an index that large meaning you might have more or less the same problem that you started with.
Instead, a good approach is to selectively use the indexing options. Tool to select only folders drives and file contents. You think you may need to find quickly in the future. It might be a bit of a hassle to set up, but it’s better than waiting around until you’re dead, big thanks to our sponsor setapp.
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