I have raved enough in the past about Vista, now it is time to give some credit where credit is due.  While much has been made of the shortcomings in Vista, it is for better or worse will be the operating system for most of the worlds computing population. As we slowly upgrade from older systems, other than the 10% who will choose Mac and the fraction of a percentage of the hardcore users out there bound for Linux, most of us are going to end up using Vista.

There is a lot to like in Microsoft’s new offering. In my opinion the best single aspect of Vista is the indexed searching capability.

More commonly called “Desktop Search” because the nature of indexed searching means that you can find pretty much any file on a system from anywhere, including the desktop.

In previous versions of Windows, when you initiated a search for a file, from the search function in the Start Menu, the operating system would begin to search through the names of each file, for the character string you are looking for, then it starts to search the contents of files, again to try and find the sought after file.

It can take many minutes to complete and seldom results in satisfaction.

Finding files within applications, especially email within Outlook is no easier, the same basic process comes into play, but within the applications opposed to in the operating system. Often you can’t remember if the file you are looking for was an email, or a document, and the results could be very frustrating.

Indexed search in Vista changes all of this. Instead of searching for files by filtering through each file on the hard drive, all relevant information about files is indexed into a database. As the computer is idle, instead of just resting, the operating system instead starts to go through every file, every email every photo on the system and record everything possible into a comprehensive index. So when you initiate a search the computer searches the index instead of the files themselves.

To put this into perspective, can you imagine searching for a book in the library without a catalogue?

That is what we were doing before, brute force searching by examining each file. Now the searches are comprehensive and very fast. Not only is the title of each file indexed, but every word within the file, every bit of meta data, such as the date it was created, is also indexed. Every file type is indexed, word processing documents, spreadsheets, emails, PDF documents, digital photo’s and even music. In my opinion indexed searching is the most profound benefit of the new generation of operating systems, Apple introduced their version, called “Spotlight” with OS10 several years ago. I think that this feature saves me at least 20 minutes a day as I am constantly searching for emails or files in my day to day work. I now routinely find in seconds the documents and emails that used to take 5 or 10 minutes each to find, if I actually located them at all.

There are sexier new features in Vista, but none as useful as indexed searching.