Australian PC World - Find fast or find slow?

Find fast or find slow?

Q We have a problem with Word 95 slowing down and virtually stalling after prolonged use. By slowing down, I mean that normal keystrokes take a long time to actually appear on the screen. At it's worst, each character might take 2-3 seconds to appear after being typed!
The slow behaviour seems to occur in patches, with the input seeming to go back to normal between bouts of "turtle-like" behaviour. However, once the process has started, it gradually gets worse until we finally give up and reboot the machine, which fixes the problem for a while. Simply shutting down Word and restarting it doesn't do the trick.
We thought it might be something simple like another "phantom" Windows program running intermittently in the background, but we've shut down everything we can, and this does not seem to change the situation. We have started WinTop in parallel to Word when the problem has been evident, but no other program seems to be taking up much processor time at all.
Your help, if any, would be greatly appreciated.
- Geoff Simpson

A Ironically, I suspect that the problems you have described are caused by a feature of Microsoft Office programs which is designed to boost your productivity and help you work faster. Office includes a utility called Find Fast, which integrates with the Find Fast Control Panel in Windows 95.
Find Fast creates an index of all your Office documents, and Office programs use this index to speed up file property and content searches in the File--Open dialogue box. So far, so good. The fun begins when Windows 95 periodically scans the files on your hard drive to update Find Fast's index. Unfortunately, the scanning process is often anything but discreet, and can cause problems such as keyboard freezes, constant disk activity, sluggishness, and system errors. In Word 95 or 97, typing may also become slow and jerky. When scanning is complete, the computer may or may not return to normal. No wonder you thought there was a phantom program taking over your computer!
The simplest solution to the problem is to disable Find Fast by double-clicking the Find Fast icon in the Windows 95 Control Panel, clicking on the appropriate drive, then choosing Delete Index from the Index menu. Reboot Windows for the change to take effect. If you never intend to use Find Fast again, you can also remove it's shortcut icon from the C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder.

Improve system performance by deleting indexes and disabling Find Fast

If you don't want to disable Find Fast -- perhaps because you frequently run document content searches in Word -- you can choose to update indexes manually. To do this, open the Find Fast window from Control Panel and choose Index--Create Index to make a new index for a hard disk or folder. Type the path in the In and below box, and select the file types you want indexed from the Of type drop-down list. Make sure that Continue to update automatically is not checked, and click OK. To update existing indexes, choose Index--Update Index. Select an index from the In and below drop-down list, be sure that Continue to update automatically is not checked, and click OK. Do this as often as you think necessary; for example, if you use the search feature infrequently, you might want to update the index right before a search.
Office 97 users have a third option. They can let Find Fast work automatically but change its interval so it doesn't interrupt their peak work times. To set this up, open the Find Fast window from Control Panel as explained earlier. Choose Index--Update Interval. Type an interval in hours -- for example, 168 tells Find Fast to update indexes once a week. (If you leave your PC turned on all the time, you could enter 24 some night when you're working late so you won't be around for most updates.) Click OK.
- Belinda Taylor and Scott Dunn

Category: Win95, Word processing
Issue: Mar 1998
Pages: 149-150