Windows 7 Search issues

Hi,

I have recently upgraded from XP to Windows 7 Home Premium (technically this is a new install, not an upgrade) and am experiencing major issues with the integrated Windows Desktop Search. XP was never showing any of these issues.

Configuration:

Filestore (Word,PDF,Excel and whatnot) plus PST files are on a qnap SAN, connected via mapped network drive. All that content has been indexed perfectly under XP. The UNCFAT extension to allow indexing of UNC shares has of course been installed.

Problem:

The search is indexing all email objects but only very few of the physical files, I can't identify any pattern for this behaviour. Some old ones, some new ones but even a complete index rebuild did not fix the issue.

Example: I do have a lot of word documents starting with TRUG (hundreds), only 8 recent ones are found through the search, no matter if content or filename is being searched for. Other search terms return 1 old PDF (year 2006) while there are a lot more documents.

None of the affected objects differ in any way, same word version, same template, same permissions.

And, what puzzles me most, Windows claims to have indexed around the same number of items as under XP...but is only showing marginal search results.

Any further ideas? I could buy a 3rd party application such as Copernic Desktop Search but don't see the point...the function is there and should work.

This is the only issue that's giving me fits in the moment...aside of that, Windows 7 is a damn good OS.

Thread can be closed, I will not spend any further time on this to analyze, I am fed up with it. I will use Copernic Desktop Search from now on which works brilliantly out of the box.

I have been further experimenting with local folders being added to a library and then creating a link to the UNC shares under that name, as suggested on Add UNC path to search index in Windows 7. However, this does not work as well, not even after another complete index rebuild. Still marginal results.

I don't really understand why Microsoft is offering such an incomplete and obscure search solution with Windows 7 (who the heck needs all these libraries, federators and whatnot) and why you even need an outdated special add-in "UNCFAT" which isn't even officially supported for Windows 7. Search in Windows 7 really sucks, good for competitors such as Copernic.

You are not alone. As far as I can tell, Windows 7 sucks in being able to find content of files (Word, Excel, PPT, text files, pdf, etc.). This is nothing new as XP suffered many of the same symptoms.

This IS definitely new to Windows 7 by all means. Your problems with XP do not relate to these W7 issues at all. I would suggest that you discuss your XP issues in a different forum, they can certainly be resolved easily.

Windows XP, equipped with WS 4.0 and all available WS updates has always been working perfectly and doesn't need any bogus "UNCFAT" extensions to index network drives. Also it is indexing all file content without any issues.

If you refer to some special formats such as Excel sheets embedded in a Word document (OLE object), then yes, XP didn't index them but neither does Copernic. This is a limitation you have in all Desktop Search Engines.

I am currently testing Copernic Desktop Search Professional (the free version doesn't support UNC and network) and will probably purchase that after the trial period. It is a shame that W7 comes with a broken search solution anyway and that you have to resort to buying 3rd party applications to cover that missing core functionality.

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PowerDesk (quite outdated on that note) is not an indexing solution at all but a file manager doing a standard file system search. Might be faster than Windows but is absolutely not matching my requirements. It can't even search in email objects.