Tip: If you’re trying to get some work done while Windows is in the middle of building the index, and the indexing is giving your PC all the speed of a slug in winter, you can click the Pause button. Windows will cool its jets for 15 minutes before it starts indexing again.
Figure 3-4: You can add or remove disks, partitions, or folders in the list of searchable items. Start by opening Indexing Options (left), then click Modify. Now expand the flippy triangles, if necessary, to see the list of folders on your hard drive. Turn a folder’s checkbox on (to have Windows index it) or off (to remove it from the index, and therefore from searches). In this example, you’ve just told Windows to stop indexing your Downloads folder. Click OK.
Customizing Search You’ve just read about how Search works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor its behavior, both for security reasons and to customize it to the kinds of work you do. Unfortunately for you, Microsoft has stashed the various controls that govern searching into three different places. Here they are, one area at a time: Folder Options The first source is in the Folder OptionsÆSearch dialog box. To open it, choose OrganizeÆ“Folder and search options” in any Explorer window. In the resulting dialog box, click the Search tab. You wind up at the dialog box shown in Figure 3-5. •• What to search. As the previous pages make clear, the Windows search mechanism relies on an index—an invisible database that tracks the location, contents, and metadata of every file. If you attach a new hard drive, or attempt to search another computer on the network that hasn’t been indexed, Windows ordinarily just searches its files’ names. After all, it has no index to search for that drive.