You know what really ruptures my hot pocket? When even though you have a fast PC, you type in a search string in the file explorer,
that progress bar inches toward the end, and then it just stops for enough time for you
to just go and find the thing the old fashioned way.
So what gives? Oh, and we're aware there's another Windows search that also sucks, but that'll be a
topic for another video. It turns out that although the Windows file search can be immensely frustrating, it's
actually just trying to be thorough. You see by default, Windows searches not only the file names, but also the file contents.
And even if you have a really fast NVMe SSD, you're essentially asking the operating system
to go through and examine nearly every byte on the drive.
And with an individual drive potentially holding trillions of bytes, this can take a
really long time. Of course, as frustrated as we get at Microsoft sometimes, they aren't stupid, and so they've
tried to mitigate the problem with a feature called indexing.
You probably heard this term if you've ever read about the way online search engines work,
as they store information on webpages in a big index so that Google searches only take
a few fractions of a second instead of hours.
Similarly, Windows indexes the contents of your hard drive or SSD while your computer
is at idle. So whenever you go to search for a file, it can bring up index results very quickly.
So why can searches still take so long to complete then?
What's going on is that although index results can come up in a few seconds after you type
in your query, Windows does not index your whole system by default.
Notably, the users folder containing personal documents, downloads, and data such as save
games will get indexed, but the vast majority of the remainder of your drive will not.
Additionally, many file types don't have their contents indexed by default either.
Windows does index the contents of text files such as those with a .txt or .docx extension,
but won't bother with most other file types, which can make finding what you're looking
for even more tricky. Once Windows finishes searching through the index, it will then turn through all the non-index
information on the disk, which the search feature has little to no advanced knowledge
of, hence the hugely long wait times when searching large sections of your drive.
Fortunately, the default settings can be tweaked to your liking.
Bring up the control panel and click indexing options, then modify, where you can choose
as many folders or drives as you'd like to add to the index.
You can also click advanced, then file types, if there are certain kinds of files where
you'd like to have Windows index the entire contents. There's even an option to delete and rebuild the index if you're continually experiencing
issues with the search feature. There's also another way to speed things up when you actually run a search in File Explorer.
Click view, then options, then the search tab. You'll see an option that's on by default to always search non-index file contents.
Clearing this option will stop the file search feature from looking through every byte in
the selected folder or drive, which is often the culprit of the search progress bar seeming
to hang near the end. But it may cause you to miss some relevant results, so pick your poison.
Now it may sound like an even better idea is to just index everything on the whole drive,
including the file contents, but beware that this can take up a lot of system resources
if you don't have a fast PC. And when you actually finally do go and run a search, it can take a long time for Windows
to search through an index that large, meaning you might have more or less the same problem
that you started with. Instead, a good approach is to selectively use the indexing options tool to select only
folders, drives, and file contents you think you may need to find quickly in the future.
It might be a bit of a hassle to set up, but it's better than waiting around until you're
dead. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with
your suggestions for videos that we should make in the future.