voidtools forum

Hi. I just discovered Everything Search Engine a few days ago, and so far I'm digging it! I think I can get used to searching "on demand" from the tasktray as opposed to firing up a dedicated search program whenever I need to look for some files. So thank you for your work on this tool, and for providing it at no cost.

Quick question: Does ESE rely in any way on the native "Windows Search" service? Would I be able to shut it down without affecting ESE? I'm figuring that if I stick with Everything, and no longer use Windows search, then I'd like to put the service on "manual" in order to have one less service running in the background, taxing system resources. Please let me know if I can proceed with this. Thank you!

DoctorG wrote:Quick question: Does ESE rely in any way on the native "Windows Search" service? Would I be able to shut it down without affecting ESE?

ESE indexes file and folder names from the NTFS Master File Table (which is why it is so fast), and does not rely on Windows Search in any way. But ESE doesn't index content inside the files, and it only works on NTFS drives. So if you only need to search by file/folder names (and only on NTFS drives), ESE is fantastic and Windows Search completely unnecessary.

If you want to search for files containing certain words in the filename and/or file content, Windows Search does a pretty good job, depending on your version of Windows (e.g., in Win7, simply click the Windows key and start typing the search term) and system resources.

I gave up on Windows Search (and Google Desktop Search) over 10 years ago on my WinXP machines (used way too many resources), and was delighted with ESE when I discovered it. Mostly I used Agent Ransack for searching terms inside files when needed (and still use it occasionally on my Win7 machines). But my Win7 machines seem to do OK most of the time with the Windows Search indexing in the background, so I've left it enabled on them, and use both ESE and Windows Search depending on my needs.