Searching with Windows XP
| With thousands and thousands of files on your
computer, there will surely come a time when you need to locate one. You
might have forgotten what you named a file, you might have "lost" or
"misplaced" a file, etc.
One of the features of Windows XP is "improved"
search. Yet, when I first installed Windows XP on my system (which has over
100,000 files on 10 logical drive letters), and went to Search, I was extremely
disappointed. A search for a file could take 5 minutes - way longer than
other versions of Windows.
One of the reasons XP's default file search takes so long is it
not only looks for file names in your directories, it processes compressed
(.zip and .cab) files, looking for your filename inside of these zipped files!
There is no easy way to change this!*
Microsoft gives you hope: XP Search Companion offers to make search faster by
turning on the Index Service. I did that. Searched again - and there was no
difference - Search was still unbearably slow! |
 |
I couldn't believe it - so I tried to figure out what was going
on - and I still can't believe what you have to do to actually use Index
Server. Once you get Search Companion to use Index Server, searching will be
a breeze.
The key: not only do you have to turn Index
Server on (which you can easily do from Search Companion), you have to change
how you enter your search.
* It might be possible to turn off searching of zip and
archive files with Regsvr32 and appropriate options. Regsvr32 is a tool
that allows you to register or un-register object linking and embedding (OLE)
controls. Based upon this Annoyances.org
article:
To remove zip/archive file support from Windows
XP:
regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
To re-enable the support:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
HOWEVER: THIS DOES NOT ACTUALLY WORK FOR ME:
I tried it; Windows reported the dll was successfully unregistered; however, the
behavior of Windows' search and Explorer with respect to zip and cab files was
unchanged on my system with or without a re-boot. I even tried un-registering
again just to make sure....
But, it may work for you: "Comments from Driber in Holland: Hi, I came across your article about searching inside zipfiles in WinXP ( http://xpsearch.info/xps1.htm ) after doing a google search on this annoyance. I tried the command regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll and
it worked like a charm for me! The XP search does no longer search inside any zipfiles and search queries take a lot less time now. Thank you very much for this information. Keep up the good work :) "
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