Rebuild Your Index In Windows 7 To Make Sure Everything’s Visible

Having just finished installing Build 7000 of Windows 7 on my PC this week (being at CES in Vegas got in the way of an earlier setup), one of the first things I tested was the search function — and it didn’t do well. In the most telling example, it totally failed to find text files that matched a given search term, even when that term was part of the file name. Indexing Options (under Control Panel) includes a troubleshooter, but it reported that everything was working fine. Since that clearly wasn’t the case, I chose to rebuild the index (another choice under Indexing Options). That took a few hours, but the results were good, and Windows Search now appears to be working properly. Of course, Windows 7 is still in beta, and your mileage might vary, but if you’re not finding search works well, a rebuild is probably indicated. Ideally, the release candidate will automatically handle this kind of problem without requiring manual intervention, especially for users upgrading from Vista, which does already include search functionality.