Computer trivia

Windows Vista has come with a great feature that allows you to quickly search through all the applications on the system and access them quickly. This gives us a respite from the usual practice of using RUN box or having the shortcuts on the Desktop to quickly access the applications. Though this search is pretty fast there is a way to make it even quicker. When ever the search utility in the start menu is used, Windows, apart from the start menu items, also searches through all the files on the disk. If you are sure that you have all the applications in the start menu, then you can instruct Windows not to search through all the files and limit the search to the start menu items. This greatly reduces the time taken to search through the items.

Follow these steps (as always, regedit is only for advanced users and can cause serious damage to the system if it is not done properly)

- Open Registry Editor (Type regedit in the runbox)

- Traverse to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Microsoft->Windows->CurrentVersion->Explorer->Advanced”

- In the right pane find the key named ‘Start_SearchFiles’ and modify it (right click and select modify)

- Set the value of this key to 0

(If the key doesn’t exist create a key with this name and assign a value of 0)

Reboot the machine and you will find that the start menu search utility is much faster.

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