Comment by grishka
3 years ago
The terrible thing about modern macOS and Windows is that they keep indexing your files in the background. Microsoft and Apple somehow consider that index-based "instant" file search better, yet it's actually extremely terrible and mostly useless. The file search in XP, that traversed the file system every time you searched something, worked so much better than anything modern. Right now I use a Mac app called "Find Any File" that does the same thing.
On other stuff Windows does in the background, I managed to disable Defender and the updater on my VM by deleting their files via the recovery mode command prompt. That seems to be the only reliable way to do that.
On Windows with NTFS drives (networked or local), I use VoidTools Everything for instant as-you-type search results. It doesn't index contents of files, and for networked drives must periodic'ly re-index them, at moderate cost (compared to the heavier cost Windows Search when indexing /local/ drives).
Also unlike Windows Search, it doesn't default to "search a few of the most common locations and either take a random number of seconds to realise at least one of the search targets was already displayed in the current folder where you started your search or claim that nothing was found (when one or more actually matches exist)".
One of my favorite ways to 'fix' vista era machines was to turn off the indexer. That bad boy would take over the machine randomly then rescan the files over and over. They fixed a lot of it in sp1 and win7. But it is still terrible.