Instant File Search Pro: You'll like the results, just not how long they take to get

Windows Search is a powerful tool, there’s no doubt about that. Its powerful indexing engine understands all kinds of file metadata, enabling you to search for documents by a particular author, music from your favorite artist, photos taken by a specific camera model and a whole lot more.

Many people are still less than enthusiastic about the technology, though. In particular, the indexing process is often reported to consume more resources than it should, and the filters can be awkward to use. But if you’d prefer something simpler, then there are plenty of alternatives around, and the portable Instant File Search Professional, just a single 618KB executable, is certainly more convenient to use than most.

The program has no indexing component to chew up your system resources, for instance. And you don’t have to remember a lengthy list of search filters. Instant File Search Professional takes an old-style approach, where every possible search option is available on the same screen: the drive you’d to like to search; the type of file to locate (document, music, video and so on); the file size, creation or modification date, and more.

While this may look a little intimidating at first, you don’t have to use any of these options: it’s enough to type part of your file name, and press Enter. So you only need to choose something like a file size if it’s necessary. Overall, the program isn’t difficult to use.

And the Search Results pane is convenient, too. If you have too many items then you can enter a further keyword to search amongst the results. Double-clicking an item then launches it as normal, or you can right-click something to see its regular Explorer context menu.

There are also some problems here. Giving up indexing means you can only search for file names, not content or metadata, for example. And searching is much slower, as the program has to crawl the entire file system each time. Even when browsing a mere 90GB of files on our fast SSD, searches took 6-20 seconds, so if you need maximum performance then this isn’t for you.

If you don’t mind the delay (or have even faster hardware) then Instant File Search Professional is a likeable search tool, though, and its portability means you can carry the program around and use it on any convenient PC.

But if you’re looking for faster searching on file names alone, take a look at Everything. It can only search NTFS drives, and doesn’t have the same date, file size or other search filters. But it works by accessing the drive Master File Table, which (once loaded) means the program can provide results just about as fast as you can type.

Photo Credit: olly/Shutterstock