On Windows Vista and every subsequent version of Windows, if I search for a file and include the entire C:\ drive, I might very well have time to make tea or a sandwich while the search results come in. On Windows XP, using the search dialog with the animated dog, I can search the entire C:\ drive and expect it to be done in a minute or two, if not in seconds.
It can’t just be nostalgia; I can replicate these results on period-accurate hardware today. What changed with Vista to make file searching so much slower, even with indexing enabled?
Back in the day, you scanned the disk. Folder by folder, file by file. If what you were looking for appeared early in your search, you were golden. It turns out, though, that scanning a filesystem is computationally very complex and takes a long time. Not something you might notice so much on a PC, but something that you would notice on a server. So, instead, you want to index the disk, slowly and over time, and then you search against the index. This works well in a server, but no so much on a workstation. Well there’s really no difference between Windows 11 and Windows Server 2024 except for some fine tuning of resource allocation. Essentially, you get the very (for desktops) ineffective server version.
dos had dir/s/*blah.wtf - pipe it into a txt file for the results if there’s too many. or /p
but yeah, on windows - everything. everything is the best search I’ve ever used, it updates (near as I can tell) instantly, and just freakin works great.
The index is there (the NTFS file system maintains it automatically) and is fast (as programs like Everything Search demonstrate)… Windows Search is simply not using it anymore, probably so it can shove sponsored shit in the results, or maybe due to lost knowledge due to lay-offs.