HD searches take 1/2 hour?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Edw. Peach
  • Start date Start date
E

Edw. Peach

I was searching for some folders on my HD that contained a certain
phrase yesterday, including the hidden files, and the search took over
1/2 hour. I have a Intel Pentium IV computer, with 25 GB of stuff,
mostly digital photos. I noticed that the search didn't even get into
the photos for quite some time, maybe 20 minutes.

Is this amount of time typical for a complete search?
 
You don't give much info, so getting even a "guess" of an answer is not
likely.

What type of maintenance program do you have ( how often do you defrag, run
chkdisk, etc)?

Are there many compressed files/folders on the HDD?

What is the capacity of your HDD? What is the speed of your processor? How
much RAM do you have installed? What are your pagefile settings?

Bobby
 
That is pretty typical for a search that is looking for a
phrase in the content. For "files and folders named..."
the search only has to traverse the directory structure.
For content searches it has to open each file and search
through the data. Essentially, it has to search nearly
the entire used disk surface.

In advanced options, unchecking "Search system folders"
and "Hidden files and folders" will help, but specifying
the type of file (if you know it) will help even more.

Mike
 
Thanks. I needed to search the hidden and system files, as I was
looking for something that I think might be spyware on my HD.

That's all I needed to know.
 
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