How to make Vista's search work properly?

Well now we part of the problem, nothing is indexed. Make sure that the "Windows Search" service is enabled, not the "Indexing Service".

To be honest it simply looks like you've been poking around and gotten tangled up a bit.
 
Two things:
If you use gadgets, get the indexing gadget. It has an option to make the indexer run at full speed which built my Windows 7 index (about 9k items) in less than ten minutes. I don't know the exact time it took, I left the room for those ten minutes.

Have you customized your permissions? I've known quite a few people (rl and otherwise) who customized their permissions to include just user/admin and that causes some problems with WDS because you've effectively denied WDS permission to read/display file information. The SYSTEM group needs at least read permission on your files for WDS to work properly.

This usually gets enthusiast's computers up and running with WDS, good luck.
 
idiotsannoyme said:
That did not work. :mad: Thank you for your help anyway. :)
I'm giving up from Vista.
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Stoly said:
search is useless on vista

its a great tool to find common used files, but anything else it just plain sucks.

actually I gave up on vista search and use a XP vm for all searches it finds everything and its fast in non indexed drives.
Click to expand...

Not sure what's causing your problems or whats wrong with Vista's search. It's always worked find for me.

I'll go into the Start menu, type mp3, and if it doesn't show me what I wanted to see (I'm networked to a bunch of shared computers), I'll simply hit 'Advanced Search' and change location to 'Computer' and hit Search again and it's absolutely precise.

You may want to try deleting your index and let Windows Search rebuild it.

Search indexes are found in:

c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows

and

c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Temp
 
heatlesssun said:
Well now we part of the problem, nothing is indexed. Make sure that the "Windows Search" service is enabled, not the "Indexing Service".

To be honest it simply looks like you've been poking around and gotten tangled up a bit.
Click to expand...

Fresh install, windows search is enabled.
 
Did you verify what JonathanJ pointed out? What account is the Windows Search service running under? Show all locations shouldn't be disabled and that the key to this problem I think. That just shouldn't be the case after a fresh install. There's definately something else going on.
 
OP - the whole threda is tl;dr, but I've never really had any problems trying to find stuff on Vista, IMO better than XP's search by far and more convenient.
 
Search is now finding every file I search for. Had to add every folder to the index, and I let it rebuild it overnight.
So, my conclusion is that by default Vista only adds a few folders to the index, trying to be smart and fast. If you want it to find everything everywhere, you have to add the entire harddisks to the index. Disabling Windows Search or the indexing service isn't enough.

Thank you all for you help and patience.
 
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