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  • #2136395

    What exactly is “INDEXing” a drive?

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    by it2md ·

    About a month ago, I posted a question about undoing and accidental indexing of my Win 7 laptops hard-drive…I’ve been ill for the last year and am just now getting around to undoing my stupidity…but I was wondering….what exactly does indexing do to files, folders and document…I mean I even lost my Internet Explorer icons, and my Accessories folder!!!….

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    • #2903715

      Clarifications

      by it2md ·

      In reply to What exactly is “INDEXing” a drive?

      Clarifications

    • #2903713
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      Indexing does nothing to your files,

      by Wizard57M-TR ·

      In reply to What exactly is “INDEXing” a drive?

      what is does is create a “table of contents” type reference so that subsequent searches of our system for a particular file will hopefully be quicker, since the table of contents is smaller than the actual hard drive. That’s why you can turn indexing off, and it doesn’t affect the performance of your installed software, but it may cause a delayed search result when searching for a file in a large number of them.

    • #2903694

      Same as the Index in a book, except

      by charles bundy ·

      In reply to What exactly is “INDEXing” a drive?

      The content of your hard drive changes, thus the index needs to be updated periodically. During this search and update your hard drive access will slow down (because it’s doing a lot of read/writes) thus causing your system to be sluggish.

      Indexing would not be the cause of your desktop items being gone, but there is a wizard called ‘Desktop Cleanup’ that might be the culprit.

    • #2903689

      Indexing may slow down your computer

      by jjx88 ·

      In reply to What exactly is “INDEXing” a drive?

      Indexing slows down your computer, especially if it’s a few years old.
      I turned off indexing through the drive property page via Windows Explorer for each drive letter. Since I organized my files in folders, there is no need to index and find them.
      Besides, I’ve used Free Commander to search for either file name or file contents containing specific words. FC also has some basic regular expression capabilities.

      • #2903668

        Reponse To Answer

        by skdtech ·

        In reply to Indexing may slow down your computer

        Indexing should not have an appreciable affect on the normal operation of your PC as it should only be happening when the PC is idle.

        It is admirable that you have your entire PC organized to a T but most people do not organize their PC that strictly and in my experience the majority of them just dump everything in their Documents/My Documents folder with no further organization. For those people indexing can be a life saver since most will never take the time to properly impose even a basic file sorting and organizational structure on their HDD. Of course, these are also the people least likely to use third-party file browsers…………..

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