NirSoft SearchMyFiles vs Everything

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Hey Y’all,

I just did a little testing of free search utilities and found NirSoft’s SearchMyFiles to IMHO work better than Everything. I tested using identical settings as follows:

Directory: G:\BEKDocs\Courses – Include Subdirectories
Text: Excel – case insensitive.

I didn’t stop watch it but SearchMyFiles was noticeably faster and it found 28 more matching files. They were all Excel files w/macros.

Another thing is that SearchMyFiles offers a more configurable search, although somewhat overwhelming at first.

I found that you can setup search configurations for different common searches and save and reload them easily from the interface. I’ve already configured one that excludes many directories from my standard search increasing speed, things like Samsung phone backup, Videos, Garmin Maps, etc.

If you haven’t looked at this tool, I’ve used NirSoft utilities for years and never investigated this one for some reason, I’d suggest you give it a try.

I’ve now pinned it to my task bar for instant access. BTW: this was a problem with Everything as after closing the first search after a reboot it wouldn’t come up again unless I went into Task Manager and killed the process?

HTH 😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
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Raysha51, Alex5723, Rick Corbett, TechTango, RockE, access-mdb

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I did not give it much time (not patience for non-intuitive programs) and could not get it to find more than 0 files. There is no indication it is indexing or searching when I ask it to find something. Everything for me, Despite my PC life including a lot of Excel VBA.

 

Were you unfound files xlsm or previous format?

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I also use Nirsoft apps, but never “Search My Files”. I’ve tried Everything, and a couple of other third party apps and settled on WizTree as an alternate to Win File Explorer. However, I checked “Search My Files” and you are right, it’s a wonderful tool. Thanks for you post!

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I have been using SwiftSearch with good success. https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/

File description on their website:
“SwiftSearch is a lightweight program whose purpose is to help you quickly find the files you need on your Windows machine without ever requiring you to index your drives.
Most search utilities that achieve similar speeds do so by indexing drives while the computer is idle, but because idleness detection is so difficult to get right, in practice they end up slowing down the whole system just to speed up search. SwiftSearch works differently: given administrator privileges, it completely bypasses the file system (only NTFS supported) and reads the file table directly every time, which speeds up search by many orders of magnitude. Typically searches yield full results in ~10 seconds or less, a significant speedup for many users.”

My Drive D is 2 TB with over 291,000 files and 14,900 folders totaling 1.6 TB. SwiftSearch returns a clickable list of hits, with info on number of hits and the time the search took. I just searched Drive D for one word without specifying file type. It took 0.13 seconds (ie a tenth of one second) to find 422 matching files of various types including .jpg, .pdf, .docx, .mp4, .and mp3 as well as file folders.

SwiftSearch doesn’t offer the full range of search flexibility of SearchMyFiles, but it does have great speed.

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RetiredGeek

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This sounds interesting, but I’d like to make sure: can SearchMyFiles or SwiftSearch look for text strings within a document? For example, if I know that somewhere on my PC I have a file that mentions Henry VIII in the text (but not in the title), but I just can’t remember where I might have put it, much less the file’s name–will these utilities find that file? And if they do, then how fast will they find it compared to a Windows Explorer search?

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SearchMyFiles: YES.

That’s exactly what I did in the OP.

HHH 😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Cybertooth

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I tried this SearchMyFiles, and my experience was decidedly less happy than yours.

Maybe there are nuances of the software that I am unfamiliar with, but as a test I set SearchMyFiles to perform a search for a term known to be on the E: drive on my Windows 7 PC. The term was “Vitamin D” and it appears numerous times in the Covid-19 folder on that drive. SearchMyFiles took 70 seconds to come up with 20 results, whereas Windows Explorer found 37 items within a second or two.

 

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Indexed search vs non- indexed. You just pay the performance penalty in advance. I have the Windows index service disabled on all drives.  Also saves disk space. YMMV 😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
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Cybertooth wrote:

This sounds interesting, but I’d like to make sure: can SearchMyFiles or SwiftSearch look for text strings within a document?

Windows file explorer has gotten much better at finding strings in many commonly used files, but I have used Deskrule in the past for deep diving.  It’s an old school website and the full version is not free.

https://www.zabkat.com/deskrule/

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Cybertooth

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