Enable fast, efficient and reliable file system search

Hello,

Thank you for reading my post.

This is my first Windows 7 notebook. As far as Windows is concerned, my OS was Windows XP before, I never user Vista intensively.

I am wondering if, given a brand new OS, there is some kind of configuration to be made to allow a fast, efficient and reliable search in the filesystem (for both searching for file names/folder names... and for searching file contents).

This is the reason why I got interested in the "Indexing Options" part of the "Control Panel".

I'd like to index both and all file names (including of course folder names, etc.) and file contents.

Need this indexing be done once for initialization and then a running service takes care of indexing new resources (new files, new folders and their contents)?
Or else, how does this work and what are the steps I need to follow to achieve my aim?

Is there any lower level interface or tool that can be used for searching the filesystem aside from the tool embedded in the "Explorer"?

And if reindexing (indexing new resources) has to be done manually, is there any handy command that can be run? A command which would only index the differential (don't want to rerun a whole several hours scan every time I want the index to be updated)...

Thank you for helping and best regards.

These links should answer all of your questions:

Index Locations - Add or Remove

Index - Add or Remove File Types

Search Options - Change or Restore

Index - Rebuild

Search in Windows 7

Hello and thank you for the links you posted.

Two questions remain:

1) I read in the "How to Rebuild the Windows 7 Index" page:

The index will often run (indexing) automatically in the background to rebuild and update for changes made to the included index locations since the last index rebuild to increase search result accuracy.

What is the name of the process running in the background?

2) I quite understandably want all possible resources on my computer to be indexed to be searched for efficiently - including file contents - so I included the following locations: "DATA ( D: )" and "OS ( C: )" in the "Indexing Options" window.

Is it realistic (how much is it going to slow down my computer)? Maybe there is no concern to have about it.

Thank you for helping.
Best regards.