File search is something that I usually perform using Total Commander, but lately things seem to be a bit different than I was used to, mainly because I got a 1TB drive, and since I have a lot of small files on it (mainly holiday photos, as well as various free programs and free music – remember Jamendo?), I started to mess with various file search tools. Today, the time has come for Everything, but I have to confess something…
… because I really like to be fair, and no matter if you may consider this a minor issue, I think you should know that I had Everything in sight for over a month now (“Free File Search Tool Of This Autumn” to me, it seems, haha!). Why did I avoid it? That’s a good question, and one of the answers coming quick into my mind is really frightening: each time I got back to the official page, I said this program looks way too simple and it may not be enough to say about it, not to mention the fact it may be one of those tools slightly different than the search tool included with Windows but, fortunately, I was wrong!
Speed is what I need when talking about file search these days, and I am sure you agree with that. After all, it’s pretty cheap to have 4-6TB of storage these days, but if you have that amount of data and you need to search something… that’s not cheap at all – you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for the search operation to conclude.
Fortunately, Everything seems to be blazing fast, and I am not talking about the fact that its creators claim it can index about 1 million files in a minute, since I also played with this piece of code, and results are pretty impressive. For example, after quickly installing the application (a portable version is also available), all those roughly 620,000 files on my hard drive were added to the program in 10-20 seconds!
Since searching based on file name only was blazing fast, I decided to sort them by size. Obviously, I clicked on the Size tab, and got a warning that it could take some time. I pressed the Yes button and then I waited for 2-3 minutes. I stopped my music player and went to the kitchen, I got some food, didn’t hurry at all, I ate it, and then I got back – the process was complete already, so I can’t say if it took 3 or 13 minutes, but anyway – I am sure that searching through all my files would have taken longer using Total Commander or other file manager’s search feature.
While Everything runs on Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista, it can only locate files and folders on NTFS volumes, and I must say that running in the background can make your computer feel a bit sluggish from time to time, but that depends a lot on the file operations it performs, of course.
More than just searching using strings and wildcards, you can also use regular expressions and boolean operators, and if you run Everything on your computer and a remote one, you can even perform remote searches!
To end this, I will add that the program used only about 40MB of memory while I was messing with those over 620,000 files that I mentioned earlier, and despite its apparently straightforward approach, Everything is a really powerful and advanced free file search tool, so if you really need such a thing… go ahead and give it a try right away, will you? Good luck… or maybe Godspeed?! 
