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below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and byline, copyright, and resource box below is included. ----------------------------------------------------------Configure Windows Indexing Service for Performance
By Stephen Bucaro
The Windows Indexing Service provides you with ability to perform advanced searches on directories located on your computer and on shared directories on network. The Indexing Service was introduced with IIS (Internet Information Services) and is now installed with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
The Indexing Service is not started by default on a Windows 2000 professional computer. If you want Indexing service to start automatically, select "Start | Settings | Control Panel | Administrative Tools" and open "Computer Management" application. In left pane of "Computer Management" window, select "Services", then in right pane, right-click on "Indexing Service". The "Indexing Services Properties" dialog box will appear.
In "Indexing Services Properties" dialog box, on "General" tab select "Automatic" from "Startup type:" drop-down list. Under "Service stautus:" click on "Start" button. A flurry of hard disk activity may begin as Indexing Service builds or updates index. The Indexing service creates an index (also called a catalog) organized in a way that makes it quick and easy to search. The Indexing Service also records documents properties, for example its date of creation and last modified date.
The Search application can be accessed by right-clicking on any folder and selecting "Search..." in popup menu. You can search for file names or you can search for text within files using keywords, or phases. Queries can use wildcards (?, *) and boolean operators (AND OR and NOT). When a user searches an NTFS volume, Indexing service will return in results only files user has permission to see.
The documents created by most applications contain formatting and control information, for example a webpage contains html tags, a Word document contains rtf tags. The Indexing Service uses filters to extract content from formatting and control information. Documents with extensions for which filters are not installed will not be indexed by default. If you want to index everything, open "Computer Management" application as described above, and select "Services ...", then right-click on "Indexing Service" and select "Properties" in popup menu. In "Indexing Services Properties" dialog box which appears, on "Generation" tab, check checkbox next to "Index Files With Unknown Extensions".
The Indexing service is designed to run continuously and requires no maintenance. After it is setup, it will automatically update index. When a file changes, OS sends a change notification to Indexing Service, causing it to update index. Folders on remote computers are scanned periodically.
