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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. |
