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Is there a Search Index like feature for windows? Something that indexes your files so that you can search though them quickly later.

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93% accept rate
you mean SilverLight?? – 0xFF Aug 19 '09 at 10:19
"Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback..." it has nothing to do with indexing/searching files – 0xFF Aug 19 '09 at 10:22
This is a non-question, sorry to say it but I think this should be closed – Ivo Flipse♦ Aug 19 '09 at 10:24
You had it completely wrong. Silverlight is a browser plugin like flash. I have since fixed the question and the tags to fix the problem and the new question should be valid. – Diago Aug 19 '09 at 10:25
Thank you. Sorry about that. – The Green Frog Aug 19 '09 at 10:27
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5 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I like 'Everything'. http://www.voidtools.com/

Very quick, very low on resources!

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up vote 13 down vote

You're referring to Windows Desktop Search. This is for XP and it's built into Windows Vista and 7

Another alternative is Google Desktop Search.

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up vote 3 down vote

If you want something that is a lot faster and less resource heavy (though can't index file content[1]), then Locate32 is a great alternative, it is a GUI pseudo-port of the unix locate command (comes in 32 and 64bit versions, is actively developed and is very small and portable):

http://locate32.net/content/view/14/26/

Windows Desktop Search, at least before version 4 in my testing was very poor performance-wise compared to Google Desktop Search. As I understand it, Microsoft have improved performance in the latest version.

[1] You can however in the advanced search options, find text within a set of files, but this doesn't use a pre-indexed database...

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up vote 1 down vote

I really like regain for windows. It's german, but it really kicks ass.
I like it because it indices all files you want and you can develop own filters etc.

One problem exist: The priority of the indexing process is setup to Normal so it disturbs you. I contacted the developer but there's no reaction yet.

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up vote 0 down vote

Cathy search utility.

enter image description here

Searching cataloged local hard drive and/or offline filesystems (network shares, CD/DVDs) is almost instant. The memory footprint tiny and the exe itself is under 48K.

Main download: http://www.mtg.sk/rva/Cathy.zip . Because updating the indexes or "catalogs" is manual (which turns out to be a nice feature performance-/portability-/versioning-wise), there's a companion command-line version to script/schedule updating the index http://www.mtg.sk/rva/CathyCmd.zip

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