From: "Gary Britt" 

No it was the indexing service.  Its background indexing was slowing
keyboard response in Word 2K.  Thanks for the explanations.  I need to give
copernic a try.

Gary

"John Beckett"  wrote
in message news:pt4rs1t3mj68hmnh8bb8i138ptm90tae3t{at}4ax.com...
> "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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