Whatever

The best free desktop search is . . . well, I’ll tell you later (really - it’s at the end of this entry if you just want to scroll down). I want to tell you about the Windows Indexing Service first.

Windows Indexing Service eats up valuable system resources (it’s true). Turn that garbage off. It’s easy, really (these instructions are for XP users). Click start, click run, type in “services.msc” then hit enter. Scroll down to indexing service, double-click it, click the stop button if it’s running, set the “startup type” dropdown to disabled, click apply then OK. Phew! We got that out of the way. Your computer is thanking you.

Oh, you should also right-click the start button, then left click Explore, right click C:, then left click properties then untick the checkbox that says “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching” then click OK and wait a few minutes. Click “ignore all” if Windows gives some garbage about not being able to apply an attribute or something like that. You can still search; you’ve just given your computer a performance boost.

If you have Vista, well, read this article, because I’m tired of typing and really, this post is about the best free desktop search tool!

Thanks for stopping by.

Oh, wait. You want to hear about the best desktop search? You want an alternative to the indexing service you just turned off? OK. It’s called Agent Ransack, and it’s free, of course. It doesn’t chew up valuable resources, it’s blazing fast, and you can even use regular expressions (whatever that means)! I’ve been using it for the past couple years. It blows away other desktop search alternatives (Google Desktop, Copernic), because it doesn’t surreptitiously invade your computer.

Download Agent Ransack here.
Get help for Agent Ransack here.

Stumble it!

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