SOFTWARE: I Load Everything

Something new to prompt me to get back into the writing groove. I've recovered from Book Review Month (I even have some reviews left over that SHOULD see the light of LCD screens sometime in the next few weeks). But I thought I'd start detailing what I use, and therefore, recommend, when it comes to software. Some if it's freeware of one type or another. Some of it's paid-for stuff.

I'm going to start with the system tray of applications that I load automatically each time I turn on Popeye (or for that matter, Nuklon and Ollie, the other two desktops in my home network). Moving from right to left, the first icon belongs to Everything from VoidTools.

Everything is a file searcher. More specifically, it's a file NAME searcher. It doesn't search for contents and it doesn't search network drives. But it is BLAZINGLY FAST when it comes to finding files on your local drives. Almost instantaneous. And when I'm searching for files, THAT is what I want most of the time. If it's something internal in those files, I have built-in search tools in my file managers. But just to find WHERE I threw some file? Well, Everything is the answer.

It will run on Windows up to, and including Win7. Can't vouch for that OR its performance under 64-bit systems. But it runs beautifully under WindowsXP SP3. Takes a bit less than 30M of memory, but that's cheap at ten times the memory space. It runs in the background, indexing filenames as you create, edit and delete them.

Searching for files is really, really easy. You click on the system tray icon. Type in the part of the name you remember and before you finished typing, EVERYTHING that matches what you typed, in whole OR in part, is there on the list. You can do more tricks using ANDs and ORs and all kinds of stuff. But I hardly ever do that. Usually, what I need is right there for perusal. You can then operate on the file in question by dragging or double-clicking or even deleting. It's all so very easy.

I have couple of tips that made life a lot simpler. It's using the Tool|Options|Exclude screen to make sure Temp folders and certain Cache folders (Firefox) are excluded from indexing and searching. Also, increase the size of the default memory size in the Tool|Options|Volumes. The initial settings are 8192K and that's perfectly fine for anything up to about 125G or so. For each 125G more than that that the drive holds, add another 8000K to the maximum size. That's my own ROUGH estimates, but it will prevent you scratching your head when you know a file DOES exist, but Everything isn't finding it. (Also, don't forget NOT to index floppy and removable drives. Waste of time and effort. The setting can be made in the Volumes tab I just talked about).

Everything is free for personal use, although the author(s) will accept donations. Give it a try and set a price for it for yourself.