Windows Search is a great for indexing your files and is included in Windows Vista by default (version 3). Version 4 is available for download from the Microsoft site.
I recently had some problems when my index suddenly was corrupt and I had to restart indexing all files, which takes a long time if you are using your computer and do not want it to interfere with your work. Somehow it started working again but I have not been able to get it to index up all my files, there are always files left to index.
To find out what’s going on and why it sometimes takes so long to index files I whipped up a small tool to help me out in my investigations, which I now I’m happy to share. I still have to do some investigation on why I still have a lot of files that don’t index and it looks like it is the Internet Explorer history, which of course changes all the time…
Anyway, here is the tool for you to grab, just download the ZIP file and unpack it and run.
The tool will show you your current Windows Search status and how many files there are in the index as well as how many that there are left. To see what’s currently indexing you have to run the program under elevated privileges or click the Elevate button (on Vista only).
The tool displaying that the index is paused due to low battery
The index tool shows that a full crawl is done, but the current indexed file is not shown
The current file being indexed is shown after the Elevate button is pressed
The tool also shows you what your current scopes are. You have to option to select a file and verify that it is in the index, and it will also show you why it’s indexed.
Hope you like it and please share your comments…
Note: I have not tested this anymore than on my Vista SP1 machine running Windows Search 4 and I do not guarantee anything…