Best Free Desktop Search Utility

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Hello Kendall.

I noticed that the reviews made mainly concern "Indexing" in the software. This precicely is the reason NOT to use these, along with having to create an index in the first place. FYI, this is one of the most painful problems with W7. The Generic search parameter has been deleted unless you want to search within the files, and we all know how long that can take.

Google works well, but like all Google products, there's just too much crapware and other non-wanted rubbish added to it. Seems the bigger the name, the more swamped by this they become (MS, Adobe, Nero etc etc to name just some top contenders of software mortal obesity).

So what we (I) are looking for is a free simple, non-bloated, non-indexing, generic Desktop searcher without extras that resembles the ease and speed of the XP search engine.

Maybe someone can "Crack" the XP version for W7 use? Food for thought.

Y'know, whoever you are, sometimes 'asinine' is exactly the right word - and plenty of pros don't hesitate to use it when appropriate. The amount of drivel that's been spewed here proves mostly that 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing', so let's set the record straight:

Any software that won't allow control over where it installs and keeps its data is unreasonable (or severely antiquated). Inflexibly targeting the C: drive is just wrong, and not only because that drive may be in use by another system (e.g., by DOS or Win9x in cases where they were installed before an XP or Win2K system). Inflexibly targeting the 'boot' (in Windows terminology) drive isn't all that much better. You appear to have misunderstood the original poster, who was rightly complaining not that he didn't have sufficient space on his *machine* but that Exalead wouldn't let him retarget its indices to a partition where space was available. This was particularly ironic given that you yourself above suggest that keeping the Windows partition relatively small is a good idea.

Multiple partitions are desirable in at least the following situations:

1. When you've got lots of large files that are almost always accessed in their entirety (or at least in extremely large chunks). In such cases, you want to isolate them from small and/or randomly accessed files so that the many small accesses to those files won't move the disk head nearly as far as they would if the large files were interspersed among them. The fact that the head has to move farther to access each such isolated large file is irrelevant, since once it gets there the transfer time for that file will completely eclipse the added positioning time. Also, large streamed files tend to get fewer total accesses than many 'hot' files on the system, further reducing any impact of having them relatively far away.

Thus very large video (or similar streamed) files should have their own partition farthest from the 'hotter' data, and intermediate-size audio, photographic, or similar streamed files should live between the video files and the 'hotter' data (or sandwich the hotter data between them and the video files) - giving you at least 3 partitions already if you accumulate enough video and audio/graphical data to be worth isolating it (and how else do people use up today's disk capacities?). You've agreed that isolating your Windows partition is a good idea, so if there's a good deal of moderately hot non-Windows data (some people have many GB just in mail files) you're now up to 4 partitions. And if you've got a whole lot of other files that are very seldom accessed but which add up to many GB of data you might wish isolate them as well from the hotter data to allow it to be more compact: you could dump them in with the audio/graphical or video data, but that would not only mess up an otherwise fairly conceptually clean segmentation scheme but also might make for more defragmentation overhead - so you might want yet another partition (for example, I maintain installation kits for Win98SE, Win2K, XP, Vista, and Win7, plus all related patches and common applications, in a separate partition: I'm not suggesting that this practice is common, but suspect that OTHER situations that suggest similar partitioning strategies may be, if only because disk space is so cheap that keeping such data on-line and updatable is much easier than alternatives).

Contrary to your assertions, such partitioning will speed up overall disk-access performance (i.e., on average each access will be faster, because performance accessing hot data will noticeably improve while performance accessing cold and/or streaming data will not be noticeably affected), not slow it down.

(By the way, your suggestion that longer head movements contribute noticeably to decreased disk life is pure poppycock, at least in desktop environments where accesses are occasionally bursty but on the whole infrequent. Recent large-scale studies have even shown that when desktop-class drives are given enterprise-class continually-seek-intense workloads they hold up pretty well, so occasional additional seek length during far less intense desktop-style activity won't produce any measurable, let alone noticeable, decrease in service life. nor will it produce a noticeable decrease in performance even if the partitioning decisions are pretty poor - you'd really have to work at it to make things noticeably worse than a single-partition layout.)

2. While there's no substitute for backups, especially when not using RAID (which at least protects your data against SOME failures), holding data in separate partitions DOES somewhat reduce the likelihood and/or magnitude of potential loss - not when the disk crashes catastrophically, but when it develops lesser failures. Bad sectors, for example, tend to occur in clusters: if all your data is in a single partition a few bad sectors in the wrong place can wreak havoc with the entire directory (or even the underlying partition) structure - sometimes CHKDSK can reconstruct it without much help, but there's no guarantee that it can. Software can run amuck, but usually at a high enough level that the system's drivers will limit its damage to the partition that it's currently accessing. Malware may only target your boot drive rather than perform a thorough search for others.

3. Partitions are an entirely reasonable mechanism for structuring data - not just as an effective additional directory layer, but in terms of the ways it's used. Some data sets require much more defragmentation than others if they're to remain responsive, so separating them such that large amounts of data that don't require frequent defragmentation don't add to the defragmentation overhead of the data that needs it can make sense. Same for backup: unchanging data only needs to be backed up once - or sometimes not at all if it's strictly temporary data or a copy of, say, material on optical disks - so keeping it out of the backup process in a separate partition may be useful if that process doesn't easily accommodate such specificity within a partition.

4. The ability to create multiple partitions was in part created to get around FAT16 partition size limits that made most of the space on larger disks inaccessible to Windows. That's not much of an issue these days, but they can still be useful for data exchange between dissimilar systems (e.g., Windows and Linux, since Linux support for NTFS is still not considered mature by many).

5. Having a separate paging/swap partition can make sense if you've got multiple systems installed and would like to let them share the paging file (which is possible with Win9x on up, and perhaps even with Win 3.xx and earlier). Then again, it could probably live with one of the sharing systems (e.g., I've shared a paging file in Win98SE with Win2K and XP). The main concern with the paging file is to make it fixed in size and contiguous (or at least nearly so), which can easily be done with a third-party defragmentation program or by moving it elsewhere, defragging the host system, and then recreating it on the host system partition in a fixed size that should be sufficient for all users. WinNT and successors should then include another variable-sized paging file (the 2 MB minimum may suffice) in their own partition (why MS swapped the terms 'system' and 'boot' in this area escapes me) to accommodate any unexpected additional pagefile needs. Any systems using such a fixed-size shared paging file should have their partitions clustered closely around it to minimize head movement: it's hot, and so are many of the system files. If you're not sharing the paging file and don't have a second disk on which to place it, then giving it a sufficient minimum size in the 'boot' partition and initially making it contiguous as described above should avoid most fragmentation issues - or make it fixed-size as described earlier and create a small expansion pagefile on another partition.

That's enough for now, I guess. I've been designing and writing disk, file, database, and object storage systems (at the system level from drivers on up) for the past 34 years at DEC, EMC, Avid, and lesser-known companies, in case you feel inclined to argue about who's a 'pro' and who isn't.

- bill

Also, a quote from Microsoft in regard to XP;

" Microsoft implemented certain disk-layout optimizations in Windows XP.
To perform this optimization, during idle time Windows XP moves pages
used for booting the system and launching frequently used applications to
ensure these files are laid out contiguously on the hard disk. The contiguous
disk layout of these pages results in reduced disk seeks and improved disk I/O,
contributing to improved boot time and application launch time.

Windows XP does not perform these optimizations across volumes. Therefore,
for this optimization to be available to users, the hard disk must be partitioned
as a single volume. "

Some adjustments or alterations with regard to partitions may be of advantage for some reason, and some may result in at least theoretical improvements in system response times and performance. This may however be very hard to measure objectively.

Splitting a disc into multiple partitions, most especially five or more, will result in severe deteriortaion of system performance, as the slowest component in the system is slowed down even further, and also reduce the MTBF ( Mean Time Between Failures ) of the hard disc, as it is subjected to much increased wear and tear.

I have only posted all this here in order to make it clear to any beginners who might be tempted to try it why they shouldn't. It is not a personal matter, and it makes no difference to me whether anybody actually does something silly like this or not.