Windows XP Search

Post Reply New Topic

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !
! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

I never have much luck with my search on XP. Often it won't find files I know are there!

I tried that Google Desktop and the Google Desktop Extreme thing, which was good in that I could find things pretty much instantly but unfortunately it only seemed to index a tiny portion of my stuff so I got the same problem you described. The native search thing takes too long and crashes most of the time in my experience.

As many files as there are on a hard drive it is ridiculous to do searches the way XP does them. Worked great when hard drives were only 100MB in size, but that isn't true anymore.

Yeah, ms is pathetic. They claim Vista is going to have search facilities like Spotlight, but I can't be bothered with them anymore, they should have introduced that kind of thing with XP. Decided to migrate to mix of Mac OS, Linux and perhaps FreeBSD.

Oh by the way, Kubuntu problem was a corrupt image from the UK (typical lol) mirror, downloading from US mirror resolved it.

This distro is awesome, Internet worked immediately upon login without having to change a thing, in SuSE it took a good few hours to configure all the network stuff. Now to download a few thousand packages.

It takes quite long, but if I remember right it doesn't search for hidden files does it?

You're all nuts, wtf are you smoking?

Search is exactly the same thing as Spotlight only it doesn't search on the fly as you're typing. If you want to find all mp3 files just type *.mp3 for christ sakes, are you that lazy? What the hell benefits does an on-the-fly search give to you?

I'm sick, MS search is just as good as Spotlight, you're kinda out of your minds LMAO

OK, simple example; I tried doing a search last night for some pics and after a few hours of trawling through hundreds of gigs of stuff I just gave up in frustration and installed Linux as well as became even more determined to buy myself a Mac, that's how "great" ms search is. If I'd had Spotlight I would have found what I wanted and saved all that time. How much simpler do you need to have it explained? You may have hours to waste perhaps, I don't.

The search implementation in all of the M$ Windows versions is the worst ever I've seen in *ANY* OS. The problem is the incompetence of M$ and their implementation of their search algorithm. The one in XP by default I've noticed that it manually searches through every directory querying the dir listing. It's VERY INEFFICIENT in that it doesn't dynamically cache the dir listing (and the NTFS file system doesn't do that either). OSX's implementation is a lot better as the file system (HFS+) dynamically caches the dir listing (called journaling i think). This type of implementation is the same in Linux and that's why the search is so much faster in OS'es like OSX, Linux and other *nixes. From what I've heard Vista isn't much better.

Searching takes longer buy only because Windows actually has software installed, as oppose to OS X which has none LMAO

I still don't understand what you're talking about, you looked for pictures? Why didn't you search using *.jpg? Then sort by name? I'm completely confused, you guys are so confusing :L

Yeah, I used to search for something on linux thinking it would take a few minutes but I discovered it was already done seconds later!

Is this what you call "no software"?

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/







Yeah that's what I tried. But what happens if you've got thousands of MP3s or JPEGs or whatever spread across many different partitions on a few different hard disks? Windows needs to go through each directory looking which takes hours. That's where ms search fails us completely.

Last edited by andy1976uk on 19 Jan 2007, 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Microsoft just sucks in general. I think I should start looking for macs....

hi, I'd just like to share this little app: Ava Find

it's great, doesn't take a lot of resources, and has instant results.

Most of the time I'm still using dir /s in command line