I haven’t done a ton of testing with Windows Search but the goal is to rival Google Desktop application that allows you to easily search directories and files on your computer. I have installed and tested each of these on my laptop and quickly uninstalled each. Currently my laptop has 2GB of RAM and a 1.2GHz processor and at this point just not enough power to handle either application. I have yet to try it on one of my desktops with a more powerful processor and more RAM however I still don’t think it would be worth the processing and memory cost. After uninstalling Windows Search my Outlook and Internet Explorer applications were immediately much faster.
Windows Search and Google Desktop provide a great service on your PC which is to put all the information at the click of a button. No more waiting around or trying to find information instead you can type in text into a search field and have it display as quickly as Google might provide you results for searching for something online. Again the problem is the power it takes to constantly update that data. If you had a PC that just crunched that data all the time and then only provided you the results then it would definitely be very beneficial. At this point I would recommend against Google Desktop and Windows Search unless having all of your applications being slow is worth being able to locate files/folders immediately on your PC.
If anyone has thoughts or suggestions relating to Windows Search and/or Google Desktop please reply with a comment. I would love to find a way to run either one if it did not affect my overall performance.
I’m have have similar issues with this Windows Search putting a strain on my available resources. It’s a pretty nice feature and came to me at the right time when I needed to be able to find files on a large file server here at work. But the amount of indexing it does is seriously annoying. I constantly find myself right clicking the icon to “snooze indexing” just because it gets in the way when I’m trying to work.
If there is something better I can use, I’d really like to know what it is.
I believe you can schedule it to only index during certain times. Google Desktop is less bloated than Windows Search however it is still a resource hog. Since it is a work computer then maybe you can get them to fork over some money to purchase more RAM which might solve your problem all together. Regardless if you need updated search information at all times on a Windows PC then whatever you use is probably going to be a resource hog.
Using a (desktop) search tool has positive and negative effects. What you have to accept is that there is in my opinion not a single search tool that doesn’t slow down your computer at least a little bit. The only thing you can do is trying to find a tool which works best for you, even lookeen does slow down my PC a little bit but I have no other choice because I need to search my Desktop and of all the tools I tested lookeen is the best one.
Hello doh,
Fair enough! I personally prefer to use the resources only when I need to actually do the search instead of having a service constantly search and cache the results. I do understand the need though for people who constantly search for new items on their computer to have the ability to look items up quickly using such an application. We appreciate you taking the time to provide your thoughts and opinion in terms of what application will do a good job.
Thanks.
alex