I’m sorry, Microsoft, but the build in Search utility (especially in Windows XP) just doesn’t always work. I’m not one to just look for a third party app, but in this particular case, I had a customer needing to search for the proverbial “needle in a haystack” against a large folder of generated data files.

I happily came across Mythicsoft FileLocator Lite and it was the right solution for the right problem at the right price (free!).

Unlike most file locator programs, it does NOT create and maintain an indexing file, but you would be surprised at how fast it is!

If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, this post is not for you.

However, if you are running Windows XP, when you run Disk Cleanup (My Computer, right click on a disk drive, then click Properties), you may see a message “Scanning: compress old files”. Back in the day so very small disak drives, this may have been a somewhat useful option. More importantly, it takes a long time for this scanning process to complete.

My recommendation is not to compress old files. And with a quick registery edit, you can disable this option so it does not run when you do a disk clean up, and no reboot of your workstation is required.

1. From a command propmpt, type  regedit and press enter.
2. Drill down HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer > VolumeCaches > Compress old files
3. In the right pane double click the {Default} key and the Edit String window will display. The Value Data field will contain a long 32 character string, similar to:  {B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678}  (see screenshot).
4. Delete the entire 32 character string in the Value Data field, then click OK, and close the Regedit window.

That’s it! Now, when you run disk cleanup, you will no longer get the  ‘Scanning: compress old files’.