Indexing so extremely slow as to be useless

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Indexing on my Win11 desktop is so extremely slow as to not be of any value.  I called MS support in late January 2022. I was told they are aware of problems with Indexing and are working on a solution. I was told to reset Win11 to fix my problem, and also that they could not promise that that would fix the problem.

I have installed all the updates since my first call. I have run the troubleshooter. And I have also tried deleting and resetting the index. Nothing has helped.

I am reluctant to do a reset because of all the work involved in this process.

Any ideas?

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Stop indexing?

Not a sarcastic remark. Seriously, stop indexing. I have, on win 10 and was pleasantly surprised at the increase in response time.

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That is where I am at right now. Indexing is turned off. This allows Outlook to search within emails without relying on Windows indexing. Searching is slow but bearable. My problem is searching files. Without indexing, searching takes forever. My index before this broke was over 600,000 items. I really need indexing to work.

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More memory and an SSD would be my suggestion.

cheers, Paul

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Paul,

I have a 500 GB SSD and 32 GB of memory. That should be more than enough. Plus, indexing worked fine with Win10 AND Microsoft support has acknowledged that there is currently a problem with indexing, and they are working to fix it with no ETA.

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Have you tried a 3rd party search tool?

People here often recommend “Everywhere”, but I haven’t used it so I cannot comment.

I use the free “Lite” version of “Agent Ransack” by a company called Mythicsoft (a UK company IIRC). This is a cut-down version of a commercial product. You are offered a choice of paid, trial or free/Lite option the 1st time you run the program. There is a portable version (which I use) so you could try it out without installing anything.

As a quick test I have just done a file name search for a particular word I know occurs in the names of a few files of different types (with .txt, .mp3 and .mp4 extensions). It searched and listed the 13 cases amongst 48888 files of all types (no extension specified in my search criteria) in 9 seconds (on a hard disk drive containing my “data”, not the system partition SSD). It does allow for searching for words or combinations of words inside files (in say .txt or .pdf files), but this obviously takes longer than just a simple file name search. You would need to try it to see if it meets your particular needs.

HTH.

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Yes, I meant “EveryTHING” (not “EveryWHERE”, I was only half-correct) – see next comment from Microfix. Apologies

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Greg Andrews

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https://www.voidtools.com/
‘Everything’ might fit your needs for indexing.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

1 user thanked author for this post.

Greg Andrews

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DD,

I’ve ditched Windows Indexing and Search for NirSoft’s SearchMyFiles it’s super fast and totally customizable as to what you want and how you want to search. It will search for files or within files for content. I’ve created a scheduled task to run it as administrator and placed a shortcut to the task on the Task Bar (Using Open Shell) right next to the menu button. Works great for me! YMMV.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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long ago I found that agent ransack was way faster than a search from win file explorer searchbar. Still very true.

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I Keep all my files on an external 3TB drive

With just a few temp files for demos etc on my C drive

My method creates a directory list of all those files.

Then search and plays / displays those files BY filename (long filenames)

Having all those files gets to be a real pain. Almost hating my data because of it.

Being able to search and play my files randomly makes it worthwhile.

If you can’t view play your data endlessly and randomly what good is it. Just a responsibility until then

I hate it when the security option kicks in when you have all those files on C…..

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