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Make Vista search mapped drives

  • 27th Feb, 2007 at 7:16 PM
caricature
My beloved Toshiba Portege R100 is dying: the cse cracked in [info]tanais's hand so I can't plug in headphone or microphone connectors or turn the wireless on and off any more, and now it keeps crashing with either hard drive failures or NTFS.SYS STOP errors (where the hard drive driver fails to cope with the hard drive failing). Losing the integrity of the case may be part of the problem; the duct tape isn't enough! Until I can buy the delightful new R400 I'm using an HP as my main laptop so I've been tweaking the Vista installation. Out of the box, Microsoft doesn't let Vista search network drives - but then Windows Desktop Search for XP doesn't do it out of the box either. The add-on for both is here - along with an add-on to search Internet Explorer history files.

Microsft's official stance has been that searching remote drives slows things down too much; they have to fix that when Windows Home Server comes out. There's still no option to snooze or restart indexing in Vista the way you can in XP: a little too nanny-knows-best alas.

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[info]autopope wrote:
27th Feb, 2007 19:18 (UTC)
This happened, of course, the week after I offloaded my P2000 -- the R200's predecessor, same form factor -- for a song. Right?
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[info]marypcb wrote:
27th Feb, 2007 19:35 (UTC)
yup. but I know you had it earmrked for cobrabay so unless he decides he doesn;t like it after all... I do really want the R400 as it is my dream machine, but I can't have it until 'March'
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[info]sbisson wrote:
27th Feb, 2007 19:40 (UTC)
Yup... I was quite tempted by it as a Linux testbed machine for here, but you'd already promised it to Eddie. I will stick Ubuntu onto the little Dell [info]wendyg gave me instead...
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[info]syllopsium wrote:
28th Feb, 2007 09:24 (UTC)
As long as there's the option to turn it off.. I find indexing on the whole to either be a) CPU hogging b) utterly useless or c) both - after searching the other day for a file only to be told it didn't exist. Grep found it in a fraction of the time it took the find dialog to fail..
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[info]marypcb wrote:
28th Feb, 2007 14:30 (UTC)
if it's XP you have to install WDS so you can just uninstall it. in Vista the Indexing Options control panel would let you turn it off but it backs off when you're using the PC so it doesn't hog cpu.

are you actually using WDS/Vista search? files not being found usually means 1 the index isn't finished but you get a message to that effect 2 the index doesn't cover where you're looking (eg system folders, mapped drives or anything outside your personal folder from the Start menu search for security reasons) 3 the index is corrupt and needs rebuilding (I've had that in XP on one install out of the five I did with WDS, haven't had it in Vista yet) 4 you're using the old Outlook 2003 search or something else equally useless...
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[info]syllopsium wrote:
28th Feb, 2007 16:23 (UTC)
This is standard XP 'search for files and folders' with no extras added. I may try WDS at some point, but last time I looked at a review of them yahoo came out tops - how's that comparing?
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[info]marypcb wrote:
28th Feb, 2007 19:21 (UTC)
XP search? you might as well not bother.
I haven't used the yahoo one in a long time because after version 2 WDS got so good I switched to it. I combine it with setting the IE default search to Google so I get local file search and online Google search in the same interface.
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