Why is everything that Microsoft does unreal bloatware?

[beeblebrox]

I have been using WinXP on my T40p since it came out years ago and can not upgrade to Vista (corporate rules).

Because I have quite lot of files (business databases, lots of pdf documents, etc.) I have constantly been looking for some useful search software.

Of course, the first versions of Microsoft Desktop Search were tested but I ended up with Copernic Desktop Search, which has been quite good but I constantly have problems using it with Lotus Notes.

These days the new MS Desktop Search 4.0 was released, with big fanfare that is is 33% faster and identical to Vista search.

Sure, I deleted Copernic and installed Microsoft. The problem tight now is: I can hardly use my machine. It runs like an asthmatic tortoise most times, sometimes it is quicker, more like a frozen toad.

I don't know what to do, have read many support notes on Microsoft's help page. I even let run the notebook over night, but I only got about 50.000 indexes files, which is about 25% of total files. CPU usage is 100% most of time and the hard disk is constantly in use.
I am afraid, my Thinkpad would wear out faster than MS Search would finish its job.

I am at the end of my knowledge here, installed MS Search several times, but with always the same slow effect. MS search is said to be the gem of Vista.
Is this the so called MS bloatware or is a Pentium 1.6 Ghz just too slow for a search algorithm?
What am I doing wrong here?

[carbon_unit]

What was wrong with Copernic? Why did you switch?

[K0LO]

I never had much success with Microsoft Desktop Search on XP. There was too much intrusive disk activity. It often seemed to chug along and then, for no reason, start over again.

However, I have to say that the indexer works REALLY, REALLY well on Vista. I just added a 20,000 file archive to the disk and the search indexer finished up in 10 minutes, in the background while I was working. On Vista the indexing is a low-priority process that has minimal effect on normal disk access. I don't think the XP version gets that right.

About all I can suggest is to check the options and limit the indexing to those folders that contain user files.

[beeblebrox]

I never had much success with Microsoft Desktop Search on XP. There was too much intrusive disk activity. It often seemed to chug along and then, for no reason, start over again.

However, I have to say that the indexer works REALLY, REALLY well on Vista. I just added a 20,000 file archive to the disk and the search indexer finished up in 10 minutes, in the background while I was working. On Vista the indexing is a low-priority process that has minimal effect on normal disk access. I don't think the XP version gets that right.

About all I can suggest is to check the options and limit the indexing to those folders that contain user files.

I left Copernic because I thought MS Search would be nicely integrated into windows explorer, which it was.

Your indexing is so fast?
That's strange because 20.000 files would take about 5 hours. I let it run overnight and it just had about 25% of my files indexed. Watching it, it was about 2 seconds per file. With that speed it would take a week to index my measly 60 GByte disk. Copernic could do it in a few hours.
I have 1GB RAM and 1.6 GHz Pentium M, this should be enough. I am sooo disappointed about MS. Understand now the hot discussions about Vista.

[jdhurst]

I tried Copernic and didn't care for it (YMMV). But on my T41, the newest Microsoft search keeps a record of about 56,000 files on my machine. It took some time (an hour thereabouts) to initially build, but takes about 4 or 5 minutes on each startup to refresh.
,,, JDH

[RealBlackStuff]

I have switched off the Indexing service on all my PCs and laptops (all running XP Pro).
I've installed PowerDesk Pro 6 from VComm (recently bought over by Avanquest). PD is a replacement for Windows Explorer with numerous extra functions.
One of them is the Find function which works extremely fast.
Looking for a file on a 20GB partition takes only seconds.

You can now get a free version here: http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlpowerdeskfree.html