Zaidy036 said:
Not exactly a small program. It remains resident. Its FAQ says:
1.4 Does "Everything" hog my system resources?
No, "Everything" uses very little system resources.
A fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (about 20,000 files) will use about
3-5mb of ram and less than 1mb of disk space.
1,000,000 files will use about 45mb of ram and 5mb of disk space.
That seems quite a bit of memory for just an filename indexing utility.
I suspect they keep their table (of files and paths) in memory so use is
instantaneous; i.e., rather than scanning for the file(s), it indexes
them in the background and keeps its table in memory so on the few
occasions when you use it then its operation is immediate - as soon as
you type in filtering criteria, it already has the file list in memory.
So that it doesn't have to re-index (scan) your files at periodic
intervals, it remains resident to monitor file I/O. That way, when you
create, delete, or rename a file, it knows immediately to update its
table in memory. It's because it remains resident (always running) that
it doesn't have to scan like other file search tools.
Still 45MB is a big chunk of memory when you compare it to your other
memory-resident (background) processes currently running. The 45MB
value is for 1 million files (but they don't mention at what average
length for the filename). After many years of use of Windows XP, I have
around 60K files so I'm nowhere near the 1 million mark. I'd probably
be around 10MB for memory consumption with this program but that is
still a big footprint for a memory resident program.
Whether this product appeals to you really depends on how often you have
to go searching for files. If you use a hierarchical structure to where
you store files, you probably already have a good idea of where to look.
Otherwise, a file search tool comes in handy when you have no clue of
where to begin searching. Since I only occasionally have to search for
a file, like once a month, then wasting the memory for an always-running
on-the-fly file indexer is not of value to me. Agent Ransack (renamed
to FileLocator Lite), a non-resident file scanning tool, works for me
the few times that I have to search for a file. For someone that does
lots of file searching then it makes sense.
If I were to map to or connect to file servers over the network then
something that went out there to index those files would be handy. The
organization of files out there isn't under my control or I only get to
manage a portion of it. Something that lets me search all those
networked files would be handy. Alas, Everything won't index anything
other than local drives so something else would be needed to find files
in an environ not under your control and where lots of users are
contributing to the population of files.
Also, their FAQ says they only index files under NTFS. So if you're
still using FAT16/32 then Everything won't work for you. That also
means that local drives that are removable (e.g., USB flash drives)
cannot be indexed unless you convert from the default FAT32 to NTFS.
"Everything only indexes local or removable NTFS volumes."
It does support regex (regular expressions) which can make it far easier
(once you learn regex) to specify just the files you are looking for.
Wildcarding usually returns a lot of irrelevant files.
