Charlie
Sat May 17 19:54:18 PDT 2008
Justin Martin [MSFT] wrote:
> Microsoftie here :)
>
> The progress bar was a design decision made by the program management team.
> It does not show progress, but it does reflect that we're still performing
> work. It was tweaked significantly during the different Betas and Release
> Candidates until people were generally ok with it.
>
> Searching in indexed locations should be fast. It should be even faster
> with Window Search 4 (
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940157) installed. The
> more locations on the disk you have indexed, the faster the searching of
> these locations should be. Keep in mind that we don't index the entire drive
> on purpose, as the indexer wasn't designed to handle the load that is
> associated with indexing directories like Windows or Program Files.
>
> Searching all of the Computer is a very costly operation, because a majority
> of the time is spent crawling the disk trying to find the items that you're
> looking for. The non-indexed search of Vista is slower than XP and other
> engines by default, because we end up searching more properties. Also, we
> perform our searches differently than most engines (word based, rather than
> character or regular expression based). This isn't an excuse, we should
> still do a better job of being more efficient.
>
> Granted that it may be slower in some situations, there are things you can
> do to improve performance of your searches.
>
> 1. Scope your search location. Only include the locations you think that
> you may find the file you're looking for. This will obviously speed things
> up.
> 2. Scope your search to only search for properties you care about. Use
> either the Advanced Search Pane or directly use Advanced Query Syntax (such
> as name:foo, or author:bar). See
>
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711.aspx for more details. The
> syntax isn't perfect and there is a lot of work trying to keep the behavior
> of non-indexed searches to match the behavior of indexed searches (which
> isn't perfect), even though it is two completely distinct search providers.
> 3. Add more locations of the files you care about to the index. When
> searching non-indexed locations like Computer, we will leverage the indexer
> to return results for indexed locations on the system.
> 4. Keep the "Search system folders" checkbox unchecked in the Search
> Options, unless you're sure that's where you want to look. When this option
> is set, searching from c:\ will not search within system directories like
> c:\windows and c:\program files.
> 5. Don't use the "Include non-indexed, hidden and system files (might be
> slow)" checkbox in the Advanced search box unless you have to. This option
> will not use the index at all and will perform a non-indexed search of all
> locations and also look in system folders.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Justin
>
> PS - I'm going to try to do a better job of popping into the newsgroup now
> and then to see if there is anything that needs answering.
I believe you are trying to say that the Vista search function is a
hopeless waste of space. If we follow your suggestions we will know
where everything is anyway, In XP *.mp3 found all the mp3s, in Vista it
does not.
You bet there are things that need answering.