If you want to improve your search, the best place to start is with the indexing feature itself. In Control Panel, open the Indexing Options window to show the folders in which Windows is currently looking for files.
Here you can select each folder to include in the index; you can index the entire disk, index only certain subfolders. By default, only your personal files are indexed. But if you plan on hacking Vista, as described elsewhere in this book, you can index your entire drive.
For example, this will make it easier to find .exe files in the Windows folder, but it will increase the size of the index, which can slow down other searches. For privacy reasons, you can exclude certain folders by removing them from this list. You can speed up searches even further by excluding
folders that you do not need to search.
Click OK when you have selected the folders to index, but are not finished yet. Then click the Advanced button to open the Advanced Options window. Most of the options shown here are self-explanatory, but it may not be obvious that Windows will not index many file types unless you manually select them in the File Types tab:
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Select only the types of files you want to index to speed up your search. Stay tuned for more Windows Optimization Tips!
Ben Karigtan shows you how!
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