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select "Start | Settings | Control Panel
| Administrative Tools" and open the "Computer Management" application. In the
left pane of the "Computer Management" window, select "Services", then in the
right pane, right-click on "Indexing Service". The "Indexing Services
Properties" dialog box will appear.
In the "Indexing Services Properties" dialog
box, on the "General" tab select "Automatic" from the "Startup type:" drop-down
list. Under "Service stautus:" click on the "Start" button. A flurry of hard
disk activity may begin as the Indexing Service builds or updates the index. The
Indexing service creates an index (also called a catalogue) organized in a way
that makes it quick and easy to search. The Indexing Service also records the
documents properties, for example its date of creation and last modified date.
The Search application can be accessed by
right-clicking on any folder and selecting "Search..." in the popup menu. You
can search for file names or you can search for text within files using
keywords, or phases. Queries can use wildcards (?, *) and boolean operators (AND
OR and NOT). When a user searches an NTFS volume, the Indexing service will
return in the results only the files the user has permission to see.
The documents created by most applications
contain formatting and control information, for example a webpage contains html
tags, a Word document contains rtf tags. The Indexing Service uses filters to
extract the content from the formatting and control information. Documents with
extensions for which filters are not installed will not be indexed by default.
If you want to index everything, open the "Computer Management" application as
described above, and select "Services ...", then right-click on "Indexing
Service" and select "Properties" in the popup menu. In the "Indexing Services
Properties" dialog box which appears, on the "Generation" tab, check the
checkbox next to "Index Files With Unknown Extensions".
The Indexing service is designed to run
continuously and requires no maintenance. After it is setup, it will
automatically update the index. When a file changes, the OS sends a change
notification to the Indexing Service, causing it to update the index. Folders on
remote computers are scanned periodically.
The Windows Indexing Service uses a fair amount
of disk space (approximately 30% the amount of the original files). If the
shared directories on the network are large, it can consume a considerable
portion of the computer's memory and processor cycles. There are several options
for configuring the Indexing Service to improve performance.
To configure the Indexing Service select "Start
| Settings | Control Panel | Administrative Tools" and open the "Computer
Management" application. In the left pane of the "Computer Management" window,
click the plus sign next to "Services and Applications", then right-click on the
"Indexing Service" icon. In the popup menu, select "All Tasks | Tune
Performance". The "Indexing Service Usage" dialog box will appear.
The "Indexing Service Usage" dialog box
provides three radio button options that let Windows set the Indexing Service
Performance for you; "Used often", "Used occasionally", and "Never Used". If you
want to provide your own custom setting, set the "Customize" radio button and
click on the "Customize..." button. The "Desired Performance" dialog box will
appear.
The "Desired Performance" dialog box contains
two slider controls. The "Indexing" slider control sets how quickly the catalogue
will be updated. Adjust it to the left to reduce the amount of system resources
used to update the catalogue. The "Querying" slider control sets how quickly
search results will be returned. Adjusting it to the left will reduce the amount
of system resources used, but search results will take longer to return.
You can also control the Indexing Service by
configuring the specific folders to be indexed. When you click on the "Indexing
Service" icon in the "Computer Management" window, the right pane should list a
catalogue named "System". When you double-click on a catalogue, you will find three
folders, "Directories", "Properties", and "Query The Catalogue".
Note: If Internet Information Server (IIS) is
installed on your computer, you should also see a catalogue named "Web". The Web
catalogue scans the C:Inetpub directory.
To add a folder to be indexed, right-click on
the "Directories" folder and select "New | Directory" in the popup menu. In the
"Add Directory" dialog box that appears, enter the path of the new directory. To
remove a folder, left-click on the "Directories" folder to display the list of
directories in the right pane. Then left-click on a directory and select
"Delete" in the popup menu.
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