Start Menu > Search > Change Preferences > With Indexing Service

This screen will clearly tell you if the service is enabled or disabled and lets you change the setting if you wish. You can also do further configuration by clicking Change Index Service Settings (Advanced) which will lead you to the MMC Computer Management screen described in my previous post, but for most people this will not be neccessary.

(note: both of my posts refer to the Indexing Service in Windows XP. i’m not sure how the service works in any other version of Windows.)

Those checkboxes on the drive’s property menu are simply asking whether or not you want to ALLOW the indexing service to index that particular drive IF the service is running. If it is not running then nothing will be indexed:

1. Right click My Computer and click Manage. This will open Computer Management.
2. Double click Services and Applications. This will expand the list.
3. Right click Indexing Service. This will bring up a menu giving you the options to start, stop or pause the service. If the stop and pause options are greyed out then then service is not running. If the start option is greyed out, then the service is running, and you would need to click stop to stop the service.
4. If you want to configure more options, you can double click Indexing Service to bring up the Indexing Service screen. From there you can configure the service, the catalogs and the drives/folders within each catalog. But this is only relevant IF the service is running. If it is not running, then no need to configure all of that (which is simply the quicker way to configure to allow each drive for indexing than going thru the drive properties menu in explorer. again, there is no reason to do either if the service is not running).

Yes, the little check box under “advanced” is usually marked with the exception of any new folder “I” create on the root level but if I dragondrop the folders from a data cd or dvd that I created on the same or another machine or extract from a .cab or .zip file, the whole lot of the folders is “serviced for indexing” and sometimes the files are also. The reason I find this out is because I work with a lot of graphic and audio files and before I open to edit I always remove the “Archive” and set the “Read Only” attributes so I’m always forced to do a “Save as” instead of possibly ruining the original. So when I find the files are “indexed” (even though I never asked for them to be) I check the folder and usually it’s also “indexed”
what a pain this can be to fix sometimes especially after unloading 10 or 12 Data DVD’s of audio files containing a ton of .wav or .mp3 files.

Are there any solutions or is it just a bug in the way “exploder” handles “outside” files?

I do know how to externally modify the “Archive” & “Read Only” attributes in one pass but not the indexing?

Attrib /s -a +r *.*
from the folder just below all of the files I want to change, marks them as stated: -”Archive” +”Read Only”
(from the DOS box this is extremely fast but will quit processing if there are any “Hidden” or “System” files within the same tree).

Cheers
◄RfD►

Thanks for the tips! Excellent! I appreciate the comment!

By the way, how do you know each new folder is indexed? Is the check box “For fast searching, allow indexing service to index this folder” checked?

Aseem

also I’ve never met a faster search than;

DIR /S filename.*
or
DIR /S *.ext
whatever filename or extention you’re looking for:
“wav, jpg, mp3″ etc.
it produces instant results even for files that are way up some obscure tree.
To do this, open a “DOS box” and type “cd \”
from there you do the search for whatever file(s) you want.

DIR /S *.*

will show every file on the drive except hidden / system files if you want to see those add ” /a ”
to the line, and it would look like this

DIR /S /A *.*

it can also be “Piped” and viewed later

DIR/S filename.* > search.txt

the only real use for the “indexing service” is if your PC is set up as a huge file server or web server containing a horrendous amount of files and folders, especially folders containing 10’s of thousands of files. but for the normal user it’s more hassle in wasted resources and space than it returns in performance.

Cheers
◄RfD►

Good questions! Yes you can turn off indexing for each drive or partition individually. So if you uncheck the indexing for C, D would still be indexed, but would not include C.

For the second question, yes you can turn the indexing back on by following the same steps and rechecking the box in the Properties of the drive. You can do this at any time!

Hope that helps!!