what is indexing

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Question again.

Ok, I startup my disk to OS 9 and play Diablo game. While playing, suddenly the game became slow and its auto minimize to small window and there is this box pop out "indexing Progress" and its start to creating index of my Hard disk... its shown time remaining : about 19Hours!!!!!

What is this indexing? Is it a must?? can I just ignore it or somethings that i need to do about it?
 
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It's Sherlock.

I believe this can be turned off in Sherlocks preferences. It's called "find by contet indexing". By default it needs to run at least once to work. It speeds up searches of the HD, and no you don't need to use it.
 
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MacsWork is right, when indexing is running the computer can be dog slow. Set it to run at a more convenient time for you. It gives Sherlock the ability to find content inside of files instead of just finding by file title.
 
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JaneChua
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Hi Macswork & Sherman,

I am abit confused.

So this "indexing" is a MUST MUST task for Mac? I've to do indexing for my imac once inawhile (like 2 week or 1 month a time)?

And actually what does this indexing do/for? is it just like the PC windows "Disk defragmenter" or "disk clean up"???
 
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It helps you find thing on your HD.

You don't need it.

But if you want to let it finish use Sherlock to schedule it for another time.
 
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Indexing is not a necessary task, it does not defrag, optimize or perform any maintenance chore. It merely looks inside of files so that you can search for words in a document, not just search for the name of a document. For example, if you used the word "supercalifragalistic" in a document named "document00025" you might not be able to easily find that document on your drive. But if indexing was turned on you sure could find that word!
 

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