So, whenever I do a search of my hard drives (hitting Advanced Options and making sure it’ll be looking in system and hidden folders as well), Windows insists on searching my IE history along with the rest of my stuff. Problem: there are approximately 10 bajillion things in my history, and it takes about three times as long to search that as it does to search the rest of my 120 gigs, and I never want to search for stuff in my history anyway. Is there any way to excluse my History folder from searches?
And while we’re here, is there a way to make Advanced Options stay checked by default? When I check it, the items inside it are saved from the last time I used Search, but Advanced Options itself is always unchecked.
(Oh, and details: Windows XP Pro, Classic Search turned on via TweakUI.)
AFAIK, the Windows search utility doesn’t have that capability. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.
Filehunter is a shareware (expires after 30 days) file search program that can exclude directories from searches, but I don’t know if you’d want to pay $35 just for faster searches.
It’s possible that some of these freeware search utilities do the same thing, but it isn’t specifically mentioned in any of their short descriptions.
Sorry, can’t help you out there. Us Windows 2000 users don’t have to put up with crap like that.
I’ve managed to fool WinXP into allowing me to put my history on a PGP Disk. When the Disk is unmounted, it can’t search threre. It’s also a good place to store those “Temporary Internet Files”, so when the disk is unmounted, there’s less of a paper trail.
However, I had to do some serious registry hacking to get this far - to the point where I would not feel safe trying to tell someone else how, because of the risk of tragedy. What I am doing is suggesting a possible other route.
When you first open the search window there should be a Change Preferences link in the pane on the left. I’m guessing the TweakUI Classic Search hides this. Try turning it off temporarily.
You can also set the defaults with a registry hack. Setting SearchSystemDirs to 0 will probably exclude the History folder.
