Windows Search Replacement Fileseek
Fileseek is another application developed by the creator of Display Fusion, one of the best multi-monitor wallpaper applications in existence. The software is a file search tool that can be seen as a Windows Search Replacement. Why could it be a great replacement? Because it does offer features that the default Windows search does not offer and it provides results much faster than the default search.
The two parameters that you always have to select are a path and a search term that you want to find, every other parameter is optional. Search results begin to appear immediately while other files are still processed. The time it takes to process all files depends on the size of the hard drive(s), the cpu, ram, files on disk and several other factors. It is still fast enough and responsive so that it is possible to work with the search results even if the search is still going on.
Search queries are not only compared to filenames but also with file contents. This is extremely useful if you are looking for documents that contain a specific phrase. The line containing the phrase is shown in the search results together with the filename and path of the file.
Fileseek offers a few functions that allow users to refine their searches. Files and Filetypes can be included or excluded in the search. This feature supports wildcards and multiple entries.
Regular Expressions are supported in the search queries. This is a powerful advanced feature of Fileseek. Best of all though is the size of Fileseek. It's tiny with only 186 Kilobyte unpacked.
Fileseek uses a different approach than my favorite search utility Locate32. Locate32 uses a database that has to be updated regularly. The benefit of this approach is a blazing fast search, much faster than that of Fileseek. If you do not search that often Fileseek might be the better alternative.
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Thanks very much for FileSeek. Many of us digital audio workstation users need to have disk indexing turned off to preserve recording performance without glitches. Windows Vista’s search is already bad but it’s unacceptable with indexing turned off. It’s not even really a file searcher when you think about it, it’s an indexer and index-lister.
FileSeek is the answer.
good recommendation
It seems there are several offerings for this problem with my choice going to FileSearchEX. I have never heard of Locote32 so will have to give it a try. My beef with FileSeak is that it is just so slow…
My favorite is FileSearchy: http://www.filesearchy.com/
It finds files faster than FileSeek and has a simpler interface.