I've reached the end of my tether with Windows search (on Vista) it takes an eternity to search my largest drive, so I'm trying fileseek.

On a smaller machine to test things I just searched my C: drive for files named *.jpg - Windows search found just over 600 (quite quickly to my surprise) fileseek found just over 5000 and was nothing like what I would describe as "lightning fast"!

I re-ran the Windows search turning on hidden and system files - this got it up to about 1800. Where is fileseek finding the other 3200?

Actually, my real question is about making fileseek more effective...

99.9% of the time I want to just find one of my own files with something in it's name (not it's contents) in non-hidden and non-system files/folders. How to I tell fileseek to ignore hidden and system files/folders (except when I specifically want to include them of course)?

Thank you for your reply Keith, I'm surprised this wasn't included from day one - seems obvious to me.

Whilst I was waiting for a reply I also installed "Quick Search" and ran my *.jpg search again, results were:

Windows 1686 files 1min 54sec
Fileseek 4705 files 1min 22sec
Quick Search 4338 files <1 sec (So fast I couldn't even start my stopwatch)

I have no locations indexed by Windows search, and included hidden and system files in the above search.

I don't understand how Quick Search works but every query I've tried it has come back almost instantaneously...?

However, like Fileseek, Quick Search seems to have no options to filter searched locations by attribute, so neither of them seem very useful to me, although Quick Search is so fast it hardly matters... pity it's not very sophisticated.

I guess I'll have to keep looking...