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I've been looking for a program like this for years.
"EVERYTHING" is a free search utility that will locate a file or folder by name located on any of your hard drives in less than a second.
"Ho-hum" you say, "there are several programs that do that."
Quite so, but this one does it without creating massive indexes. That saves your disk space and more importantly, doesn't slow down your PC by needing to maintain such indexes.
"But how can this work?" you ponder, "instant search utilities needs indexes in order to work."
Yes they do and that's the trick. with this product; it uses the indexes that form part of the NTFS file system. It is using something that is already there rather than duplicating it.
It's a clever idea. Now why didn't somebody (including Microsoft) think of this before?
Of course to use EVERYTHING your hard drives need to be NTFS formatted but that includes 99.9% of all XP and Vista users, so it's hardly a limitation.
EVERTHING can scan multiple drives, find search terms embedded within file names and can be accessed from a desktop shortcut, the Start Menu or from the right click context menu. It weighs in at a massive 292KB download. Yes folks, that's kilobytes not megabytes. And its free.
What more can you ask for?
(Windows 2000, XP, Vista)
This item was based on a suggestion by regular contributor rhiannon.
Update: I need to clarify my comment that that EVERYTHING does not "create massive indexes." This means what it says and should not be read as implying it does not create any indexes. It does, but they are very small and created in seconds not hours. These tiny indexes are possible because EVERYTHING leverages itself off the information contained in the NTFS file system rather than recreating that information afresh.
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Yes it is very quick, & does a great job, but it is EXTREMELY limited in what it can do, as it only works on LOCAL NTFS drives. Got a network drive you want to search? Too bad. Network drives mapped or not, NTFS notwithstanding, it won't do it. So, useless for NAS drives or home servers, etc. Oh well, the search for a good searcher continues!
Wow. I didn't find this useful at all. I kept having to kill it in the task manager because it would wander off and become non-responsive even when I hadn't done anything with it yet. Secondly, it would only open from the context menu occasionally - sometimes it would just show in the task manager, but never open, sometimes it wouldn't even do that. All my drives are formatted NTFS, but this app was a total no go. I thought it was rather counter-intuitive about selecting a drive or folder to search, and it didn't seem to have any good method of doing a negative search (I want to find all files that don't match the input given).
I guess the search for a good search app goes on.
I normaly use ListMaker, It is realy good, it makes a text file of the
files you are searching.
Can't use it any more AVG and NOD32 delete ListSearch.exe so I am
looking for a new one that wont get deleted by AVG and NOD32.
any Ideas ????
Launchy is another useful searcher-
http://www.launchy.net/
SOLVED: I use EVERYTHING, but sometimes I need to search contents of my documents. So after a little googling I have found DocFetcher.
Supported Document Formats:
- HTML and plain text (both customizable)
- Portable Document Format (pdf)
- Microsoft Office Word (doc), Excel (xls) and PowerPoint (ppt)
- OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress
- Rich Text Format (rtf)
- AbiWord (abw, abw.gz, zabw)
- Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (chm)
- Microsoft Visio (vsd)
- (In the works: MS Office 2007)
http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/index.html
I'm so happy! Since Microsoft introduced that new 'Windows Search' facility, (or utility, whatever it is) back mid-2008 in the UK, i've stopped searching for files. I DO NOT understand how the blasted thing works.
What a great idea, d/l a GIZMO recommended search enging for my PC.
Once again, SIMPLY TOPS!!!!!!!
Everything is truly amazing and I have also found DK Finder at http://www.dkellner.hu/freeware/finder/ to be very impressive as well.
Additionally the excellent Locate32 search application and the Locate based Mac Search (for Windows). I modified Mac Search to use the latest Locate32 and updtdb32 executables, as I really like the minimal UI, it's fast and very appealing.
So it's like OSX Spotlight, but for windows?
See...someone did think of it, they just work for Apple is all.
I have used Agent Ransack for years: not as fast as this but you just right click on a folder and it will search for either the file name or text within it, and you can add more folders as well. You then can open or cut/copy the files as well as see the path. Paid version does more, but no nag. I am looking for a Google search that will only search my drives.
Great utility. Thanks!
Downloaded and installed. All seems fine. GUI comes up, I type in a file name, but nothing happens - no results at all. What am I doing wrong?
XP pro SP2, Firefox
Did you read the article:
"Of course to use EVERYTHING your hard drives need to be NTFS formatted"
Nice.....Quick and small....
I like Everything a lot. Google Desktop returns too many irrelevant results for me. Just wish I could search my network drives too.
hi nice site, i use snowbird6.1, but i'll try yours to see if there's a difference, no index, fast
www.indexyourfiles.com is a lot better
This is the greatest search program I have ever used. But does anyone know how to search a network drive?
Downloaded, installed, works just fine for me. Yes, it only searches filenames, and some other tool would be needed to search the contents of a file. But if one is reasonably disciplined in creating filenames, this tool is VERY quick and handy.
They should make a plugin for that.
Like the program. Very fast and yields results quickly. Now, to get a "grep style" searcher. :(
Kent
Amazing... 2.75 TB of data scanned and fully searchable in 30 seconds... Not the greatest set of search options, but for a straight search utility...excellent...Thanks!!
Database can not be created on comp in my company for some reason, so i can not review it yet. i will try it at home.
Awesome! And so quick - I have almost 3.5TB of disk almost filled to capacity and the initial index took about 45 sec.
I have tried (installed/uninstalled) numerous desk stop searches and haven't found one that has low enough overhead to be worth the impact it has on my machine. This suits me to a T.
Thank you Giz and Rhiannon.
AWESOMe !
This is an excellent search program for Windows. It's really the fastest and easiest to use I've yet seen. Look at how fast it indexes files when a new drive (eg USB) is connected. Also try typing some file name that doesn't exist on your computer into the search bar and then create a file of that name with notepad or another program and save it...the result comes up immediately. Now that is efficient. If it would only work with FAT disks it would the perfect search, however, most Windows hard drives are NTFS nowadays so it probably doesn't matter too much. Also it doesn't index Windows shares directly but the web server could be useful for that although perhaps potentially dangerous because you could unintentionally expose all your files for everyone to see if you just index full drives.
Overall a highly useful little utility and one that I'll be installing on all my PCs in the future. Thanks.
I use locate32. Haven't looked at Everything, but locate32 seems to be better. This mature freeware Windows utility indexes also network disk file names compactly and fast and has a lot of options and sophistication. Also, it is trivial to combine full text grepping in locate32, if you can narrow the result list of files to a manageable size, by name based search...
I tried them both and for my needs Everything is perfect.
There is a beta version available on the website that is a portable app; no installation required. This is going on my thumb drive.
It took about 10 seconds on my machine to index 130,000 files, and the index file that it created is about 640KB. It is blazing fast, and you can search for files using regular expressions, which is a huge advantage over Explorer.
And no, you can't search network drives; only local NTFS drives. The beta version now supports removable drives, however.
Thanks for pointing out this utility!
Thanks, I didn't know for the beta. Hope it will stay freeware?
Very cool! And I just had a colleague remove his Copernic and his Google Desktop Search because his PC was running so slow! And he just searches for filenames anyway so woo-hoo!
Thanks Giz! You are the Gizziest!
Anyone know of a fast search(FREE) that will allow me to see graphic files after they find them.
This only shows list, I need to use it for graphic(logos, pictures and mpeg view for selections.
Thanks!!
gaeckard
Started using it about a month ago. Absolutely great program. Can't beleive it's free.
Guys,
download it, install it and you'll understand what Gizmo meant!
I've got this installed for a while now and will not change it for anything - maybe only for Everything....
mario
Gizmo, which version are you using/recommending?
1.1.4.301
For what it is, it's very fast. But I need something like Copernic to find files by content. You had me excited for a minute. :)
No it doesn't index content but I didn't claim it did. The only content I index on my PC is email as I find the overhead of indexing everything else too high for the ocassional use I make of it. However I need to find files by name often and that's where EVERYTHING is proving a blessing.
Personally, I'm a big fan of Search GT, which is much faster than the built-in Windows search, does not use indexes, and does not require NTFS. Unfortunately it's not free - unless you happen to get it from Giveawayoftheday . ;)
Read this page (the FAQ) to learn more about it and how the description provided here is pretty wrong and very lacking in detail.
Still, seems like a useful little tool - especially if you have to mine other people's computers for them on occasion to find stuff they can't.
Sounds cool, but I rarely need to search my file system. The thing I search the most is my Outlook email for which it's hard to beat Google Desktop, since it remembers even items I've deleted.
Does it work with network drives?
Keep in mind, it only finds files or folders. It does NOT find words within documents. And, you have to know the name or part of the file name to conduct your search. Lastly, as far as I can tell, it does not search mailboxes. (Sorry Gizmo, I had to point out a few minor issues with this program....)
Well just heck:
Not Found
The requested URL /Â Â Â was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8b mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at www.voidtools.com Port 80
... but not "massive indexes. That [use] disk space and [...] slow down your PC by needing to maintain such indexes."
1. Link contains some strange characters
2. The FAQ says that it does use a database