Everything
Platforms available: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7
Portable version: Available at site, right below installer file
Current version as of writing: 1.2.1
Everything is a lightweight, speedy, and portable local file search utility. There’s a ton to love about it, but it comes with one caveat that will make it a nonstarter for a small contingent of users. For everybody else, there’s nothing to lose by giving it a test drive; you just might come to find it an indispensable tool.
For a long time I thought nothing could hold a candle to the elegance and thoroughness of Google Desktop’s local search capabilities. While, there’s probably still nothing that can compete with its thoroughness, in all other dimensions, Everything comes awfully close.
Before going any further, let’s touch on Everything’s sole weakness so you can move on without wasting too much time if you discover that the app’s definitely not for you. Everything is able to run so quickly (and portably) because it makes use of a too rarely leveraged aspect of Windows’ native file system, NTFS. (If you’re not sure if you’re running NTFS or not, it’s pretty safe to assume you are. Unless you manually changed the setting when installing Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7, you’re almost definitely using NTFS.) NTFS is what’s called an indexing file system. One of the special aspects of an indexing file system is that it keeps something like a database of all the files and folders stored within it. By digging into that “database”, Everything gets near-instant access to everything on an NTFS volume.
Unfortunately, FAT-based file systems don’t have anything like that for Everything to use, so they get left out in the cold. How big a deal that is to you completely depends on the way you use your computer. If you have one hard drive that keeps everything you have on it, Everything is perfect for you.
In my case, I keep a lot of external hard drives and USB flash drives floating around. Because of the relatively small size of the flash drives and my borderline OCD level of directory/folder organization, I usually don’t have much problem keeping what’s on them straight. I leave my smaller external hard drives formatted as FAT for maximum portability. But my bigger external drives I convert to NTFS because I tend to keep them as supplements to my notebooks’ small built-in drives. Also, those big drives tend to hold multimedia files, which, in my case, are always viewed/listened to on a Windows machine.
If your usage is similar to mine, you’ll love Everything. On the other hand, if you have external hard drives that you pack around to Mac and/or Linux machines, you’ll want those drives to be formatted with FAT for its near universal compatibility. The only downside to that is, of course, that Everything won’t work for you.