I want to show you two great methods how to speed up the Windows 7 search. One involves 3rd-party software and the other involves modifying the search indexing options.
Portable Fast Windows 7 Search Replacement
Search 50GB in 1 second!
I stumbled on a great little tool that can enhance and speed up the Windows 7 search! TheSearchMan is probably one of the fastest ways to search your hard drive, it supports real-time search and also indexing, so that will speed up your search even more.
Let’s take a glance at this nifty little tool settings:
As you can see it also includes an extensive search feature. Other than that, it’s small and very fast. What else do you want? Oh and it’s portable, so you don’t have to install it and can put it on a USB stick to take this search replacement wherever you go.
Speed Up Windows 7 Search via Indexing Options
Another great way to speed up the Windows 7 search is to configure the indexing options properly. If your Windows 7 searches appear to be slow, it could be that Windows 7 is not indexing. Did you disable the Windows 7 indexing ?
Enter Indexing into the search field and click on Indexing Options at the top:
How many files did Windows 7 index on your computer? If this number is relatively small, your Windows 7 search will be slow. 14,000 for example is actually pretty small. It should be a lot more if you want really fast searches.
Click on Modify and add the folders that you want to search in. Windows 7 will then get busy and index all those folders, so that it will speed up your search quite a bit.
If you have any tips on how to speed up the Windows 7 search or know a great search replacement let us know!
