windows 7 - Disable (file metadata) indexing

07
2014-07
  • Val

    When I apply the non-indexing to my folder and subfolders, remove some child folders and recover them from the Recycle Bin, the SearchProtocolHost in conjustction with SearchIndexer.exe start thrashing my hard drive. How do I stop this? How do I make "Allow files in this folder to have context indexed" option

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    effective?

    I suppose that file metadata are scanned regardless of content indexing option. But this is annoying anyway. I do not want that to be scanned at all.

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    Related Question

    Quickly filter file types or folders in Windows 7
  • barry

    I would like to quickly "filter" certain file types or folders using Windows 7 search.

    In previous Windows versions it was easy to select a folder and do a quick search for all "*.csv" files for example, this gave relatively fast results. But searching indexed contents seems to slow down a simple "filter search".

    I was wondering if there was an option to temporarily disable searching the indexed contents, much like the provided search filters in Windows 7 (e.g., kind:=Folder).

    Maybe this is not the purpose of the built in search functionality but being able to quickly filter files/folder/sub folder without looking at contents and not using a third party tool would be nice.

    Note that I do not want to switch of indexing.

    If there is another (native) way to quickly filter files or folders i would also be interested to hear about it.

    The "slow-down" seems mainly related to indexing. If no indexing is going on in the background (if the index is up-to-date) the responsiveness is better. But it would be interesting to know if it is possible to do a search without using the index. The practical problem is that when some new content containing a large number of files is added to the system this is not directly fully indexed.


    • Related Answers
  • barry

    The MSDN article on Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) has a nice summary on the available filter options.

    The article does not mention an option to temporarily disable the index for searches (which makes sense since the article is related to searching indexed contents).

  • Guy Thomas

    My technique is to make sure the 'Type' column is available in Windows Explorer, then sort on that column.

    You sometimes see a little box with file types if you click on the very word 'Type'.

  • Sim

    Have you tried type:=.csv as the search filter?