From: John Beckett 

"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news::
> Why even use the indexing service?

If your files are all under My Documents, you probably don't need the
Indexing Service. Indexing is mostly useful for programmers or other
hapless people who hoard thousands of files, and have them in various
folders.

> the indexing would slow down response time

Perhaps you are thinking of the old 'Find Fast' that was once part of
Office. I have found that the Indexing Service is very well behaved, and
has no perceptible impact on my work. However, it does use a bunch of disk
space (used 0.5GB of the 16GB on my disk here).

> is there any potential benefit to using the indexing service?

It is only useful for searching files, and then only if your application
actually uses the Indexing Service. I don't think it indexes emails.
However, the various desktop search tools allow searching emails -- I think
they use their own tricks. I have never investigated this because the
occasional "Find" in Outlook is all I need for emails.

Office has a built-in tool for searching files, and it will use the
Indexing Service if it is enabled. However, because the Indexing Service
lags behind your current work (i.e. it might not index a file for an hour),
and because indexing only occurs on C: drive by default, Office also does a
manual search which makes the result irritatingly slower than what the
Indexing Service can do.

The GUI of the Office and Explorer file search is about right for people
doing an occasional search, but I imagine that many power users would far
prefer the simpler style of something like my Search program.

John

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