My C:> drive is a 120GB SSD, filled to 37% of capacity.

Searching for a known filename takes the better part of a minute (46 seconds). The drive is indexed for fast searches. Yet my mechanical 2-TB F:> drive, with 42 times as much space taken up by files (but only 20% as many filenames), finds files faster.

In my old Vista system, searches were practically instantaneous. I thought with an SSD, my searches would be so fast they would finish before I even started.

Have I missed something in my setup?

tanstaafl.

Are you sure c:\ is actually indexed? It's not by default.

Number of files will make a large difference but a 5:1 ratio not so much. Windows has a lot of files. My C:\ (only drive) is 335k files.

Windows 7 introduced more rigorous searching I think and actually searches in the files - not sure if by default but I suspect not.

Check
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/36098-search-options-change-restore.html
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-customize-windows-7s-search-settings.html

If properly indexed though, it should be fast. Even then an SSD is still going to be faster in like for like searches

How can I tell for sure? All the appropriate tick-boxes are checked.

tanstaafl.

I like a weird little application called "Everything." It indexes quickly, and once it does the search results load impressively fast.

www.voidtools.com

I think that Windows, by default, doesn't index the entire hard drive C:.

I have that tickbox ticked as well, but sometimes when I search a given sub-folder, Windows still tells me "this folder isn't indexed, would you like to add it to the index?"

I don't know which folders are indexed by default. Probably the My Documents folder and that's about it.

Make sure your C drive is added to the search index. See here on how to do this.

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.

No worries Doug! Happy to read you've been able to solve your problem! I agree, the indexing thing in Windows nowadays is very impressive and reliable!

Glad to hear it. Once you get used to searching for what you need on a local computer, it starts to become second nature. This is one of the key things that really won me over on the OS X side, and I was hoping Windows was going to catch up with the Longhorn release. WinFS was supposed to drive this feature initially, but that got scrapped when the OS development was restarted and turned into the shipping version of Vista.

I ran on a lowly G4 Cube (450mhz G4 processor) and an IDE hard drive back at my HP job. I'd throw all the technical document PDFs at the system, and had quicker search then the intranet tools of the time. SSDs as Doug has now seen makes this nearly instantaneous.

It's also why I cringe a little when I see screenshots of the "Classic" Windows control panel. Search for me has now become my default way of operating a desktop computer. From finding files, launching programs, and changing settings. Can't really tell you where settings are, but able to change them in seconds.

Heh. My wife is a searcher. I'm an organize-your-shit-so-you-don't-have-to-searcher. At least, on the computer -- not so much IRL.