Sigh...

Here I was, all set to impress you guys with what I had discovered, and as I was writing it up, my internet connection failed. (This is Mexico, understand.) So, I'll pretend that you didn't make the post just above.

There is a selection in Control Panel called "Indexing Options" that opens up a whole vista (no pun intended) of, uh... indexing options. By default, even though all my drives had the "Allow Files on this drive to have contents indexed..." box checked, all that did was allow indexing. It didn't index them.

After going through the Indexing Options routine in Control Panel, I told it to rebuild the index. Three hours and 687,950 files later, the index was rebuilt.

In my first post I facetiously said that with the SSD, the search should finish before it even started. This turned out not to be an exaggeration. I chose a word at random ("colloquialism") and had it search the whole computer, all hard drives, all files, including file contents, and it was displaying search results faster than I could type in the search word. First, it found every file with the letter "c" in the file name or contents, then every word with "co", then "col", then "coll", etc., faster than I could type the word.

I have more than 3,000 eBooks stored in my computer. Being paranoid, I have them in there four times. (Kindle Books, Kindle Backup, and then repeated on my backup drive.) So altogether that's more than 13,000 eBooks in the index, along with the other 675,000 or so files that might contain the search term. The search, while I know is not actually instantaneous, is indistinguishable from instantaneous to human eyes.

Whoa!

The downside is that the index file itself is not insignificant in size at 3.2GB, but I still have 67GB free on my SSD and I am being careful about not storing data other than a few temporary files on the C:> drive, so in my case that isn't a concern.

It was Shonky's post last night that put me on the track to my "discovery".

Thank you.

tanstaafl.