Scope

If you've noticed that your disk has a tendency to start thrashing at seemingly random intervals, and you have Microsoft Office installed on your PC, it's likely that the culprit is a piece of software called the Find Fast Indexer.

This tutorial will take you through the steps involved in determining whether or not this is the case, and, if so, how to remove the software.

The Find Fast Indexer is a utility that builds indexes to speed finding Microsoft Office-bundle documents when you've forgotten their filenames, but know certain text strings they contain. It is installed on your computer when you install Microsoft Office 97, a shortcut called Microsoft Find Fast being automatically added to the StartUp group.

Find Fast indexes Office documents automatically and requires no user interaction. However, you can also open the Find Fast Control Panel icon to create additional indexes (for example, on a network drive), delete indexes, and set other options.

By default, Find Fast creates a single index on each hard disk on your computer. Find Fast index files are located in the folder in the topmost level in the hierarchy of indexed folders. For example, if you index an entire drive, the index file is located at the root of that drive. Note, however, that Find Fast index files are "hidden" files.

Find Fast does not automatically index files on removable disk media. However, you may create multiple indexes on a single drive, especially on shared or network drives. You can do this but you cannot create indexes that overlap. For example, if a Find Fast index exists on drive C, you cannot create an additional index for files in the My Documents folder on drive C. To create an index of My Documents, first delete the index for drive C through the Find Fast Control Panel icon.

You can specify the file types to index only when you create an index. You cannot change the indexed file types for an existing index; you must delete the index, and then recreate it.

The indexes are used when you use either of the following, somewhat obscure, search methods:

Click Open Office example on the Start menu, then type a word or phrase into one of the text-entry lines at the bottom of the window that opens up.

Have Word, Excel or another Office-bundle program already running, then choose Open from the File menu and type a word or phrase.

Consequently, for many users, running the Find Fast Indexer is likely to be more trouble than it's worth!

How to determine if you have it installed

You can confirm that the Find Fast Indexer is installed by checking for its associated file set, located in the folder in the topmost level in the hierarchy of indexed folders. So, assuming that the entire :C drive has been indexed, the files will appear in the :C root.

You can also confirm it's presence in the Startup program group by running the System Configuration Utility.

Do this by clicking Start > Run, typing msconfig.exe, pressing OK and selecting the Startup tab.

Having confirmed that the Find Fast Indexer is installed on your PC, you may wish to go a step further and confirm that it is indeed responsible for the "thrashing" that you're seeking to eliminate.

You can do this by invoking the Task Manager - by pressing Ctrl/Alt/Delete - while this is occurring.

If it is indeed Find Fast that's responsible for hogging your CPU, it'll be quite apparent!