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Everything and Locate32: high–speed file finders

imageI’ve been using a program called Locate32 both at work and home for years now. At home I have sixteen internal and external drive partitions with something like a trillion files scattered over a billion directories (rough estimate, mind you), and at work we USED to have multiple network drives that I had to search through many times a day to find a particular file. Where did I save that JPG or PDF? Which folder is Martin Galway’s “Parallax” song in again? That sort of thing.

The way Locate32 works is by periodically doing a full-drive directory scan of all of your local and network drives. You can then open its window and just start typing a partial filename (or wildcard).. it will immediately show you a list of all the files that match or contain that name in any folder on any drive that it has scanned. I can start typing “parall” and will in the blink of an eye see a list of about 12 files – parallax.sid, MartinGalway-Parallax.mp3 and so on. Incredibly useful for anyone – not just people like me who are totally unorganized but also anyone that regularly uses their computer for anything and just wants to save file finding time.

Everything is very similar in terms of primary functionality. It doesn’t have as many features, but it is able to perform something that Locate32 cannot. It uses the MFT (Master File Table) of NTFS to look up its files. Meaning it’s lightning fast with its initial scan, and then as long as you keep it running, no matter what you or your machine do, Everything instantly knows exactly which filenames are changing and which new files are appearing on your hard drive. Plus, it uses very little resources, and it also appears to have a more intelligent result sorting mechanism, but that could just be personal choice.

Everything cannot search network drives, or any non-NTFS drives, and it cannot search for text within files. Locate32 can do all of these things, so in fact Everything could be considered a “lite” version of Locate32. But it is faster with its initial drive scan and it does use less system resources. I have 12Gb of RAM so it doesn’t bother me too much anymore but still, I prefer Everything these days since I don’t need to search network drives anymore – all I look for are my locally-stored files. Got ‘em both installed so I can always load up Locate32 if I want the extended features.

Both of these programs are free and fully functional.

Everything | Locate32

Grab the latest alpha build (at time of writing) of Everything here.

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