Find anything on your Windows desktop with Everything

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Search

Find anything on your Windows desktop with Everything

by Brad Linder Sep 25th 2008

The built in search function that comes with Windows XP kind of stinks. It takes forever to find anything and often doesn't show what you're looking for. There are alternatives like Google Desktop Search and Windows Search 4.0. But they eat a fair bit of RAM, processing power, and use a ton of disk space to build an index.

And then there's Everything. This tiny little Windows utility does an amazing job of providing nearly instantaneous search results. Just download and install the file and within moments you'll be able to find just about anything stored on your system. No need to wait a few hours or days for Everything to build an index of your files first.

You can register Everything to start up when Windows starts. But because it doesn't need to spend a long time building its index, you can just as easily launch it when you need it, search for a file, and then close it. There's also a Windows Explorer shell plugin that lets you search individual folders or hard drives by right-clicking on them.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: desktop-search, everything, search

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

aolReader@jc.endjunk.com said 3:57PM on 9-25-2008

Is this able to search emails (outlook)? Or does this only search files?

Can you setup multiple databases? And search on only one database on a search?

Anybody knows how this compares to locate32?

larryc said 4:54PM on 9-25-2008

Let's be clear: Everything is *not* the same as Google Desktop Search or Microsoft Desktop Search. Everything only indexes file and folder names; it does *not* index file contents. GDS & MDS index file contents and metadata, that's why they take longer and take up more disk space.

I'm not saying this means Everything is bad, rather, it is a simpler solution to solve a smaller problem. The review did not make this clear.

Dave Forster said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

Perhaps a name change would be appropriate then.... i suggest "Not Everything But Quite a Bit" or NEBQB for short :-)

Dodfr said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

First of all Everything is "only" a file name/location indexer so don't expect document/file content search like Google Desktop. Personnaly I don't need content indexer so it's ok.

I have tested 3 other tools like Everything and here are the pros/cons, as usual, no one is "perfect", may be i'll develop my own one day if I have time ;-)

- Everything : Free, works only with NTFS drives, RegExp search style option, include a HTTP/FTP/ETP server so you can remotely connect to an other Eveything's machine and do your search thru a web page, ETP/FTP permit to directly connect to other Everything database. IPC SDK is available for developers so your own application can send search's requests to Everything and retrieve result's list.

- Ava Find : Free for basic version, the first tool I found, basic but efficient.

- Instant Find File : Not Free, similar to Ava Find A bit improved, when folder name appear in result's list it display its total size.

- Locate32 : Free, open source, Windows 98/NT4/2K old style's search dialog box (I like it), ability to do a file content search from the file serach result (content is not indexed so it take as much time as the old search style dialog box). The only one in the list that not have realtime file indexing, so you must set its schedule time option (you can also force update) to make it refresh its database's index.

Stuart Halliday said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

I like using the free Spotlite search tool.

http://www.primianotucci.com/default.php?view=89

Dagur said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

So this works like the "locate" command in linux (and cygwin)

dodfr said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

Yes indeed, but I forgot to mention that Locate32 include a command line version called "locate.exe" ;-)

dodfr said 8:57AM on 9-26-2008

To answer Stuart about Spotlight, as I am always looking for new tools I tested it but I see two problems :

First it is written using .NET so you must have .NET 2.0 on your machine, and second problem, as all .NET application, they use much more memory than direct Win32 API applications, Spotlight uses more than 40MB but other tools I tested uses about 6MB

kishore said 3:58PM on 9-27-2008

aaaaaaa

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