Expect that the search totally sucks. Have you tried Voidtools Everything? It finds files instantly, even on filesystems with millions of files. Yes, instantly, you type a word and it's just there, no matter SSD or HDD. Windows' built in search is a complete waste of time.

It only searches the names.

> Some of that bloat is useful

Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.

> Windows indexes files in the background

But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Everything's a tradeoff.

> But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Turn it off then?

Even when you turn the search indexer off, the indexer background service still seems to be doing ... stuff.

I have a Windows 10 VM I use for some testing and such, and all these background things keep using up huge mount of resources, no matter what knobs I turn and regedit levers I pull I just can't get it to stop.

For comparison, I also have a macOS VM which certainly isn't fast, but nothing like the Windows one. And the BSD and illumos VMs work basically fine (although in fairness they also don't start X11; but I do just ssh in to all of these machines and never use the GUI for anything).

But if you turn it off, you don't get the start menu indexed anymore. I don't need my files indexed, I just want my start menu shortcuts indexed. There's a few other small things that no longer work without indexing, though I forget what they are now. Everything is great, but there's actually other services that depend on search being enabled, as it tells you when you try to stop the service that is shutting down dependent service first.

Yes? That doesn't affect my point about it being a kind of bloat.

Windows has been indexing files for over 20 years.

Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search function that usable, and more than once I've had a "clean and build" process fail because some file was open and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read, the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So, I turned it off.

And then 'everything' search tool came with instant fuzzy find. A strange experience after years of buggy and slow MS indexation.

Indexing is a weird example to use considering how notoriously garbage Windows file search is.

For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it takes forever to find file names.

It’s also searching the contents. Try turning that setting off.

And yet when I want to search in the files in a folder searching with windows search won't turn up anything, so I have to switch to the WSL and grep...

I feel like this is something where determinism would be a win. Maybe have indexing, but pre-prioritize certain common searches.

I notice that I get completely different results on my home and work machines doing the "start button, type" search. for "Downloads", expecting C:\Users\Username\Downloads, the home machine figures it out after three characters. The work machine seems to have decided that I clearly want "File Explorer, not any particular directory" and "Change how I download updates in spite of it being a corporate-managed box where I probably can't push that button without asking IT to remote in and do so" are what I want, even when I spot it the whole directory name.

The new Windows Terminal is also extremely slow for some wild reason

Launches into PoSh 7 x64 in <1s for me on Win 11.

> Some of that bloat is useful.

If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of Windows is bloat by definition.

You've got CLI editors that are smaller.

A graphical user interface? Just bloat.

Ships with a TCP/IP stack by default? Just bloat.

Mouse support out of the box? Who would want that?

C64 lovers would likely agree with all of those points.

Oh but that's just Amiga envy.

On Linux machine I can access and find my files fast. And without any indexing running on the background. Shit... even I could run the OS from a rust HDD and be usable without pain. Windows10/11 without an SSD it's painful slow.

> Windows indexes files in the background, which would choke a single-core machine with HDD for sure.

This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a performance hit, but it was the first thing to be disabled after installing windows.

Index for what? The Windows search has always been unbelievably bad and it has only gotten worse since Windows 7.