The developers, Void Tools, call the Everything search engine an “administrative tool that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows. Unlike Windows search “Everything” initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”).”
Though we know that Windows actually does display everything, including hidden folders and system files if the right option is checked, it does so slowly, searching from point A to point B until it finds the file indicated, within the search parameters. The advantage of the Everything search engine is that it takes a few seconds to index your files and folders (using Window’s NTFS databases) and is ready from the moment the system starts up. The software is constantly updating the database, but, if you want to save some memory resources, which come to about 35MB of your physical memory, you can switch off auto-update when the program is inactive. In the case of a freshly installed software or file tranfers, Everything claims it indexes 1 million files in approximately 1 minute.
Certainly one of the best things about Everything is that it runs even on Windows 2000, apart from Windows XP, 2003, Vista and Windows 7. It will be able to locate file and folders on all local and removable NTFS volumes, but not mapped network drives.
You can also share a list of files and folders across computers, by creating an HTTP, ETP, or FTP server. You can set a password for this as well, to ensure no one else using Everything can log on to your machine. Depending on your firewall settings, you will also be able to copy files from the machine you are viewing. You can also export a list of files onto your desktop in text form.
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Lastly, you can use regular expressions (regex), wildcards, or boolean operators to greatly enhance your search results. Refer to this for more information on how to use regex with the correct syntax. Apart from these advanced options, users can also search by matching case, matching whole words, or matching paths. A warning: Everything will not search within files, like Windows does with certain types of text files.
You can download Everything from here, and check out our previous DOTD software here.