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Tip #4449 - Speed Up Your Vista Searches

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Speed Up Your Vista Searches

The Windows Vista Start menu search box is one of my favorite features in Vista, but searching can be pretty slow if you have a lot of personal files. By default, the Start menu search also searches for files, Windows contacts, Windows Mail, history and favorites. Wow, that's a lot to go through!

Well, lucky for you, you can customize the search results from the Start menu search box to only return the results you really want. For me personally, I only want to use the Start menu search to pull up applications, so I disabled everything else. You can do whatever you need to do!

To configure this setting, right click on the Start button and select Properties. Next, click on the Customize button and scroll down until you see the checkboxes under the Search section.

Here's a shot of my screen with all of my settings in place:

For the best results, change the Search Files option to "Don't search for files." The Start menu is too small to find files anyway. Making that change will speed up the search process immensely. Here are the details for what the other options do:

• Search - This should disable the search entirely, but it doesn't seem to remove the search box, so I just left this enabled.
  
  
• Search Communications - This one disables searching through e-mails and contacts. As far as I can tell, it's only for the Windows Mail and Windows Contacts right now. I assume other applications will eventually be added here, but I disabled this, because I don't use either product. But do what's best for you!
  
  
• Search Favorites and History - This option searches through your Internet Explorer favorites and history. Perhaps in the future, it will also search in Firefox, but I disabled it for now, because I only use Firefox.
  
  
• Search Files - You can change this one to search all of your files or just your home directory. Or, you can disable it entirely for more speed.
  
  
• Search Programs - This one searches through the Start menu and the applications you have on your computer. You can customize it to your liking.

Here's to a much faster search in Windows Vista. Yes!

~ Ramachandran Kumaraswami

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