Comment by vee-kay

Comment by vee-kay 4 days ago

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A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as (portable) freeware since 15+ years.

Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.

bobbob1921 3 days ago

Amazing, perfect app! I use it frequently, and I love the response I get from customers or friends whom I turn onto it (or install it for). I also encourage others to donate to this developer. The sad thing is casual users would not even think of donating as they assume this type of feature should be (properly) built into the OS; so I’ve made sure to donate on behalf of users I’ve turned on to Everything. Great app!

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  • vee-kay 3 days ago

    I was overjoyed when I saw that Microsoft had bought out the small Winternals team (Winternals Software LP, founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who exposed the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy-protection DRM) that gave awesome freeware "power tools" to tweak and monitor MS-Windows. Microsoft renamed it as SysInternals, and Microsoft has since maintained it well and still kept it all free.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

    Fun trivia: Mark Russinovich went on to greater heights, and he's CTO of Microsoft Azure.

    I wish Microsoft would do the same for another amazing freeware "power tools" suite: Nirsoft Utilities. https://www.nirsoft.net/

    I really don't know how Voidtools has survived all these years, by giving away their primary product (Everything Search) for free.

    https://www.voidtools.com/

    Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.

    https://www.voidtools.com/faq/

    For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.

    (Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)

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