So, uh, I made the move from Windows 2000 to XP about two weeks before Vista came out. Maybe I’m a little behind, but then so is my computer.
Anyway, I have a lot of files on my four hard drives; searching all of them takes about ten minutes, so I tend to leave the search window up for days at a time, since my usual search is “*.avi, *.mpg, *.mpeg, *.mov, *.rm, *.ogm, *.vob” to find all of my video files that are scattered across the hard drives.
The problem with this is that I’ll often be watching a video file, notice it start to slow down, go out of sync, etc., then minimize it only to realize the cause of that drain on my CPU is XP is searching all my hard drives again without me telling it to do so!
Why? I have no idea, but it just keeps doing it, over and over again.
Other than getting a third-party search tool, is there any way to stop this?
Do a google search and download “Agent Ransack”. It’s a great, free, well-behaved windows search tool, and no, it won’t search again without being told to.
Since the first step to turn off the indexing is given, I have this peril for you. It may help. Right click the bottom tool bar and open task manager. In the process tab after you start explorer, right click explorer.exe and choose set priorty to belownormal. Click yes on the pop up that asks if your sure. This piorty will last until the program is closed. This will help if the search program is the pronlem. Do the same to the media player setting it’s priorty to abovenaormal if the problem persists. At this setting the player has priority over most other programs, so it can cause slugishness with the mouse and other stufff, if your processor is overloaded. The performance tab on the task manager lets you know what the CPU load is quickly. The process tab lets you know what the individual program load is on the CPU.
What exactly are you seeing that makes you think that XP is searching your drives?
Another thing in XP that I’ve seen slow things down is System Restore. It can be a handy thing for some users, so read about it before disabling it. To disable it, right-click My Computer pick Properties, click System Restore tab, check the box that says “Turn off System Restore on all drives”
I’m opening the search window and watching the names of files fly by. And if I stop it before it finishes re-searching, I lose my old search results, so I have to let it go for the full ten minutes to retain the full list of files.
Ok, I understand what you mean now. You are leaving the search results window open, and at some point Windows starts searching again. I’ve seen that happen but it’s never been a problem for me.
I Googled for Windows Search workarounds but I couldn’t find any. These are the only Windows Search settings I could find, they require registry editing and won’t help your problem: Computing | TechRadar
I guess the best option is to use a different search.
The thing is, Windows knows that the search results are temporary and transitory.
So if there is any disk activity, the search results may be invalid, and it refreshes the open search windows. Which involves redoing the search.
Disabling the Index service will slow down your initial results, as there will be no index to rapidly build the search results. Future refreshes won’t change.
Two suggestions
1 - move your scattered movie files to a regular structure (maybe on just one disk), so you don’t have to search the whole computer every time.
2 - use a third party search tool with a persistent database, and only refresh it when you need to.
If you are looking for third-party tools, Google desktop might be what you need. It seems to get the usual mix of reviews, but I have a lot of respect for Google products. Anybody have an opinion?
I tried the previously mentioned search program, along with the Google and Yahoo offerings, and was just plain baffled. There are far too many options.
I just want a search program that will let me type “*.avi, *.mpg, *.mpeg, *.mov, *.rm, *.ogm, *.vob,” and have it bring up all my video files.
So far, I have not found such a program - and the UIs (especially Google’s) have been horrendous.
I don’t want to hunt through pages of documentation to figure out how to do a simple search.
I just want something that’s as close to the XP search as possible, but that doesn’t constantly re-search and slow my computer down.
Well this is illuminating. In all the years I’ve used Windows I have never left a search window up after I found what I was looking for; it would never have occurred to me to keep it around.
What about Google’s Picasa? The link only mentions pictures, but I think I recall it indexing my .avi files as well. I don’t know about the other types of video files, as I’ve rarely used it so far (and I’m at work at the moment so I can’t check).
I have a lot of video files on my computer, and my organizational skills are lacking, to say the least, so I simply search for every video file on my PC and arrange them in alphabetical order. I scroll down the list until I see something I’d like to watch and then I do so. When I’m done, I find another one to watch from the same list. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Are you using Windows Media Player to watch the videos? Because you could just let it index all of your media for you one time, and then select from the Library tab. If you’re downloading lots of videos all the time, you’ll have to add in the time to refresh Media Player’s index.
By the way, the only reason that Windows would re-do a search is if something is written to one of the directories that is included in the search results. Is that likely to be happening?
I’m using Media Player Classic. The newer versions bug me. And since I’m searching everything on my PC, a search starts again anytime anything is written to any hard drive. If, for example, I get online and download a PDF file in between watching things (or a download completes as I’m watching something), it triggers another search.
Once you have all of your search results for the file types you’ve specified, select all of the results and copy them. Make a new folder on your desktop (or somewhere else convenient), open it up, right click, and select “Paste as Shortcut” (so you’re not actually re-copying all of the files).
Now you’ve got access to all of the files in one place. From now on, I’d suggest saving your files in an organized way so you don’t have to search for them like this!
It’s a rather inelegant solution, but a solution nonetheless.
After I do a search, I just click on the Folders button in the Explorer top toolbar. That leaves my search results visible but no longer treats the routine as a search.
