i misplaced a file. I knew the filename included several words and specifically included the word Alice.
I opened Explorer, entered Alice in Search.
it took almost 15 minutes.
i was literally shaking with Anger. i made myself a little sick for the next hour.
My SO checked my BP with a cuff twice. scary stuff. I can’t risk a stroke because of a damn computer.
a dir ===Alice.*=== in a cmd window would find that file in under 10 seconds
(can’t type a proper wildcard. discourse sees it as formatting a word)
i won’t comment further on the Winblows Jism Search command.
is there a handy directory App for Windows that facilitates various string searches in filenames? the question mark wildcards one character. dir *Alice??.doc would find Alice23.doc, Aliceaw.doc but wouldn’t find Alice.doc or Alice023.doc
a app could do that and make it easier for newbies that never learned DOS.
The speed of it comes down to how indexing is handled (or not). The folder you were trying to search through in Explorer… was it in a custom folder and not under the standard Documents or such?
If the folder is indexed, a filename search should take less than a second, not multiple seconds and certainly not 15 minutes. You can configure the Windows search index to be “enhanced” and cover the whole drive, as opposed to select folders: Search indexing in Windows - Microsoft Support
Or just try Everything, which builds its own index in just a few seconds.
Since I have cygwin installed, I would just type the Linux command
find . -name '*Alice*'
You’d need to have an enormous number of files for that to take more than a couple of seconds. Other options besides installing cygwin are installing WSL, which is another way to use Linux tools on Windows, or use the Windows PowerShell. In the latter case, the syntax would be
Using Linux for something like this is a bit overkill though, unless you’re already familiar with it and prefer it. Otherwise, there are plenty of native Windows search utils available, both CLI and GUI.
Besides, their performance still depends on indexing. On Windows that can mean (among other things) being able to read NTFS metadata tables or hooking into the Windows search index.
I just thought of something… does this computer still have a mechanical spinning hard drive, not a SSD?
If so, that would make both searching and indexing quite slow. Indexed searches would still be fast after the indexing is complete, but that initial indexing might take minutes instead of seconds.
A few tips that might help, using the command-line window (CLI).
The “dir” command with the “/s” switch (to include subdirectories) can quickly find files matching a wildcard specification on any given drive. Or, dir x: *.* /s > filename.txt will pipe the full directory of any drive to the file “filename.txt” which can then be searched with a text editor.
The “where” command (type “where /?” for help) is a newer way to locate files.
The “find” command locates files that contain a specified text string.
That’s all fine, but you can still make search much faster for them by indexing them.
PS you can also disable and uninstall Onedrive completely if you don’t use it. I hate that thing and don’t use it either. Makes my folders “normal” again.
As for indexing, if you want something fast and easy, try that Everything app. It only indexes filenames (not contents) and it does so very quickly, a million files a minute or something like that.
The default Windows index is a full text (file contents) search, I believe, and will typically take several hours to build, especially on a mechanical hard drive.
Once indexed, though, either tool should be very fast.
In case it wasn’t clear, indexing is a one-time operation that, well, indexes the files on your disk in one central, fast database. It’s a similar idea to a library index, where you have a list of book titles in a single database that can easily be scanned, instead of having to walk through all the aisles every time you want to find a book.
My own preference (and this is just a preference) is to always turn off indexing on all drives. I prefer to avoid the overhead and on the rare occasions when I need to do a search it doesn’t normally take very long anyway.
That looks like an SD card you might have attached, not your primary drive?
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter unless you were considering an upgrade anyway. Bang for buck, if you did have an older mechanical drive, a SSD would be the biggest upgrade you can get (both for searching and for general everyday use).
I think on a recent enough computer with a fast SSD it won’t matter much. On older, slower computers, though, indexing can make a huge difference… it can turn an unindexed 15 minute search into a sub-second response.
Not adding anything to the discussion with this but I also recommend Everything. It’s simple and good. It does not search external drives, OneDrive, etc. by default so you need to add those in Tools>Options
It doesn’t index contents, but you can search for them. Use the content:keyword format (or GUI Search>Advanced Search>A word or phrase in the file:
