Vista Indexed Search: impact of indexing everything?

So, Microsoft warns us not to index everything as this will slow down searches. On XP I used a great program called Locate32 which I used to index everything (including my network shares) on a scheduled basis. It only indexes filenames. For 99% of my searches that's enough, as I have a habit of using long, descriptive filenames for all my documents. I like having everything indexed as it makes it easy to find system files, etc for maintenance. Some locations don't need to be updated as frequently. Despite indexing all the contents of several drives, Locate32 searches are reasonably fast.
I also used Copernic2 to index a few locations where I might have files I wanted indexed by content. Again, I actually rarely used content searches.

At the moment, I'm just using Vista's native search with the default areas being indexed. I realize it can't search network shares, although it does seem like the new 4.0 version will let you search network shares if the server is also indexing using 4.0.

The question is, how bad will Vista search get if I tell it I want to index everything? Alternatively, is there any way to have search index everything by filename, but only certain locations by content? (I know you can tell it to index only filename for certain types of files, but I'd like to make this distinction by location as well.) Am I better of leaving Vista's search to index a few locations and going back to Locate32 for my routine searches? It would be nice to have a fully indexed search better integrated into the OS, but if it's going to slow everything to a crawl, it's probably not worth it.

Thanks!

Hi Magritte,

You can turn indexing on or off for a particular folder by right clicking and choosing properties. click the advanced button and you can pick to index or not. Also on the search tab in explorer, you can choose to search only filenames.

Don't know what effect full indexing will have on your comp, but I have everything indexed. Searches sometimes take 10 sec. instead of almost as fast as I can type.

Hope this helps,
Gary

Thanks for the reply. That doesn't sounds so bad so maybe I'll try it. I guess I can always go back if it turns out to be too slow.

Actually, what I meant about specific locations is I'd like to be able to index only the filename (rather than full contents) for files under a specific location. I know I can turn a location on or off for indexing, but if it's turned on, I don't know of a way to only index the filenames. I'm assuming that indexing content makes things much slower than just indexing filenames (but I could be wrong about that).

thanks!

"magritte" <magritte.373s13@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net> wrote in message
news:magritte.373s13@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net...
<snip> Ceci n'est pas un post...

You can index network shares, but you need to install a Microsoft add-on
called UNCFATDMS.exe which comes from the UNCFATPATHInstaller.msi available
here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

I use TrueCrypt (Used to use Steganos Safe), which mounts a file container
as a mapped drive: this extra allows me to have that drive indexed as a UNC
path and it has worked just fine for me for since I got it almost a year
ago.

HTH

--
Julian I-Do-Stuff

Some Vista stuff, but mostly just Stuff at http://berossus,blogspot.com

Thanks for the tip about adding UNC paths. I actually noticed that in the XP version of WDS but it's missing by default on Vista's search.

Actually, I've ended up giving up on having Vista index everything as the performance of searches ended up being really poor. Localized searches (of say the start menu or a specific folder) weren't too bad. But if I tried to do a global search (from win+f) or the root of a drive it would be very slow. To be fair, it hadn't finished indexing yet so it's possible it might perform somewhat better once everything was done indexing, but it had been around 3 days it was still indexing. There doesn't seem to be any way to tell it to pause indexing, or to go full out and index as fast as possible. So it just chugged along steadily but very slowly with the indexing until I gave up and went back to only indexing a few folders where I keep most of my documents.

I went back to using the utility Locate32 for indexing filenames throughout my whole system. It only updates the index on a schedule, or on demand, but the indexing only takes a few minutes and searches are virtually instantaneous. I like Vista's search integration with Explorer, but it just doesn't have anywhere near comparable performance.

Thanks.