On Windows Vista and every subsequent version of Windows, if I search for a file and include the entire C:\ drive, I might very well have time to make tea or a sandwich while the search results come in. On Windows XP, using the search dialog with the animated dog, I can search the entire C:\ drive and expect it to be done in a minute or two, if not in seconds.
It can’t just be nostalgia; I can replicate these results on period-accurate hardware today. What changed with Vista to make file searching so much slower, even with indexing enabled?
Just get Everything Search and you’ll be able to search just as fast as you could in XP, and with no Bing spam messing up the results.
Funny¹ thing is that Everything (and similar programs like WizTree) can be that be that fast because Microsoft’s own NTFS file system has a built in file index, which is what Windows Search used back in XP; the search programs practically don’t have to do any work, NTFS has already done it for them.
Of course, though, that’ll give you the results you want, not the results Microsoft wants, which explains the change in later further enshittified versions of Windows.
1.– And by funny I mean not funny at all. Sad, in fact. Tragic, even, maybe.
I don’t think everything uses some kind of premade file index. Whenever I start up everything, it starts with indexing all my drives, one by one, churning them at 100% if I look at the task manager but everything even says so in the bottom left corner. it even stores hundreds of megabytes of that index in memory.
what it actually does, as I know, is that instead of going through the slower filesystem APIs, it first scans the MFT with its admin rights, and then listens for any changes through the usn journal. so it does quite some work, because afaik both of these are publicly undocumented, and then it even implenents a very quick search for the index that even supports pattern matching
I’d do that, but changing to Ubuntu, but thanks.
Just make sure to add git and node_modules as exclusions