how to enable universal search for vista

[nikemen]

So, I have historically used a product called copernic, but would rather just use what is in VISTA if that is just as good to have universal search, emails, documents, pdfs, presentation, etc.

Does anyone have a primer on turning that on, and if it works well or not?

[mgo]

So, I have historically used a product called copernic, but would rather just use what is in VISTA if that is just as good to have universal search, emails, documents, pdfs, presentation, etc.

Does anyone have a primer on turning that on, and if it works well or not?

Microsoft has a FAQ here which should answer most of your questions:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... chfaq.mspx

People have a love/hate relationship with Vista's search. It's pretty good at finding what you want, but the hard drive will thrash for several minutes after each re-start because the indexer wants to re-scan the index. Not once, but three times! Lord knows why....

The best way to avoid that annoyance is to use hibernate, instead of shutdown. Hibernate does not cause this re-scan, nor does Sleep.

If you have tens of thousands of files, it will take 20 min to a half hour to re-scan after a cold boot. If you only have 2 or 3 thousand items, it will only take a few minutes.

You can select out files that you do not want indexed (like pictures, etc) which will speed up the re-scan.

Last time I read an article about it, Search cannot be disabled in Vista. It's there, like it or not, says Microsoft.

Search is pretty much instantaneous, unless you want to search non-indexed areas of your computer system. Then it can take a heck of a long time.

Search will play well with Copernic if you want to run both. Search will find items in .one files (OneNote) but at last check, Copernic will not, unless they have updated it.

[SHoTTa35]

HD trashing after reboot is not indexing that's superfetch. Turning off the indexer will do nothing for HD thrashing.

Just thought i'd clear that part up. I don't shutdown my machine, it just goes to sleep so i never have problems with superfetch using up the HD (mind you it's done in low priority mode moving few KB/s not MB/s. )

[jdhurst]

I downloaded and tried the most recent version of Copernic and was disappointed that it did not find a number of things I think it should have.

Windows Vista search will find most things. It will *not* find OCR text.

Windows XP search (new fast search coupled with companion search) will find everything I have and need found. This is the best one for me. YMMV.

... JDH