Fine-tune hard drive indexing for faster searches

We can’t emphasize enough the difference that a properly indexed drive or folder makes when you need to perform a search in Windows. If your PC is anything like ours—multiple hard drives, all containing loads of nested folders, some of them hosting thousands of data, photo, video, or audio files—a simple search for a particular MP3 file or Word document can feel like swimming in Jell-O.

Windows will index certain portions of your drives in the background during idle time, primarily e-mail and the files in your Windows-default library areas (Documents, and the like) but you can speed matters along by specifying which file types Windows should index. This is handled by a Control Panel item, Indexing Options. It’s not new (Vista had it as well), but it’s not much trafficked.

Visit this panel, and click the Advanced button. Then click the File Typestab. Here, you can examine which file types are being indexed, and to what extent. For each file type, you can designate to index the file’s properties alone, or both the properties and the actual content. That’s important—check your most frequently searched file types to ensure that the actual content is being indexed. You can find that selection here, in the circled area:

You can also designate which drives and folders are being indexed. Hit theModify button, and you can specify which locations Windows 7 should index; make sure the ones where you’ll often conduct searches are designated. You can also tell the system to ignore certain huge drives or folders you know you’ll never need to search.