R
Mon May 19 06:06:43 PDT 2008
Hi, Justin.
Welcome to the newsgroup! ;<)
> The progress bar was a design decision made by the program management
> team.
> It does not show progress,
Well, it APPEARS to show progress. Where is there any indication to the
user that it is showing anything other than progress?
> but it does reflect that we're still performing
> work.
But there is NO feedback as to whether it might be finished - or give up -
in another 10 seconds or that it might take another 10 hours - or 10 days.
:>(
There is no clue as to whether it is now searching in Drive C: or in Drive
X: or even somewhere on the Internet maybe?
> It was tweaked significantly during the different Betas and Release
> Candidates until people were generally ok with it.
I participated in the last year or more of the Vista beta; at least a
half-dozen builds, both 32-bit and 64-bit. I recall significant
improvements in some parts of Search, but NOT in this "progress bar" area.
That feeling that it would never get to the Finish Line did not go away
during the beta - or since.
The non-productive and non-informative pulsing of that green bar gets to be
INFURIATING!!! Doesn't anybody on the Microsoft Team understand that?
Thanks for the tips about how to speed up the Search. My frustration,
though, is not that the search takes so long, but that it NEVER gives up, or
even pauses to take a breath, give me a progress report, and ask me if I'd
like to trim my parameters or if I want it to just "press on!"
> 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.
Please do, Justin. You will, of course, get flamed by some immature
readers. But you also should hear some legitimate complaints, questions,
requests and suggestions that you will never get from anywhere else.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1)
"Justin Martin [MSFT]" <JustinMartinMSFT@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:89EA85CC-3690-49F0-A2F6-F1A56EF4266A@microsoft.com...
> 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.