Windows 7 Search/index network drives??

[starmanjones]

Win7 takes a giant leap backward-- you can't index network drives! XP's desktop search did this fine. Googling shows Vista had a patch to fix this-- but not Windows 7.

I tried loading my networked music in Windows Media Center, which makes it show up in my Music Library, but it's still not indexed--takes 20 minutes to do a search. Then, for some strange reason, WMC loses its database and nothing shows up in it. Very buggy.

Has anyone found a workaround for this significant limitation? One of the reasons I upgraded to Win7 was built-in desktop search, but this is a showstopper for me.

 

[starmanjones]

I MAY have found a workaround. Installing WDS 4.0 onto an XP network drive host makes the network drive assignable to a Library. It STILL won't get indexed though-- but when I do a search on that library, it SEEMS to use the network drive host's WDS to perform the search-- that is, it's faster than a manual non-indexed search. I suppose this uses less network bandwidth-- but I hate this solution-- I have gigabit ethernet and don't care about network usage darnit.

So much for you NAS users, this won't work for you. Should work for Vista (WDS 4.0) and other Win7 network drive hosts though.

Surprised none of you have found this to be a problem.