Quick File Search, results in 1 second instead of 5 minutes.

Do you use Windows Search to find your files? I used to as well, until 6 years ago. Now I use Glarysoft Quick Search, which directly reads and searches the MFT of your storage devices. (It also works on FAT32 drives with a slight performance hit.)

It performs the search each time you type a letter, and it says I have 238,433 files and folders.
Yet from the time I take to look up at the screen after pressing the last letter, all the results have loaded.

I have a modern computer but nothing spectacular: AMD 1.6 ghz quad core processor (released 11 years ago), DDR3 memory, 5400rpm economy hard drive. I built this for energy efficiency and to leave on 24/7 (uses just 16 watts at idle). It was a cheapo, about $120 all-in.

Quick Search is free and small at 6 mb. Their website is https://www.glarysoft.com/quick-search/

I know I sound like a shill, but I'm just an extremely satisfied user. I can't understand how Windows can take so long to do something proven to be so simple.

By the way, I see on their website they're on version 6, but I only have version 5 on my XP SP3 and XP x64 installations.

 

I have been using 'Ultrasearch' for a few years, works similar to to yours.

https://www.jam-software.com/ultrasearch

 

I've not heard of either one so thank you very much!

 

Wonderful! I used to use Ultrasearch as well, and found the Glary program to work more reliably. It supports right clicking any result to bring up copy, paste, explore menu right to that folder with the file selected in view.

But isn't it amazing that the XP tool can be so slow, and the Vista tool can't find anything, after seeing what's easily possible with these tools? It's the same comparison I see with win98 minimum 3 second text-display while installing a device like USB, vs winME just flashes by and gone.

 

Ultrasearch does that too.

I couldn't figure this out either. Why the holy hell is this method not THE STANDARD? Searching a disorganized computer has gotta be the single largest pain in the ass of using one, especially if you're doing multiple searches to narrow the results down. Imagine waiting 10 minutes after every iteration.

A 12-year-old could've thought of this. Don't believe me? After looking at the Defrag results in the early days of XP I noticed it said the MFT was something like 60 MB. I knew what an MFT was and knew HDD speeds were around 40-50 MB/s back then so I wondered why you couldn't search the MFT for files which would take only a second.

So if a non-gifted child can think of this, WTF was Microshaft's excuse?