Windows Indexing

Thanks I know how to re-create the index but:
1. Why do I lose many or all index entries at random
2. Why I the rebuild now much, much slower than it used to be?
Terry
PS Sorry if I've missed the point or points in the URL offered.

Delete it and create a totally new one.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-edb-file

If the index file is sitting on a bad spot on the hard drive. It can be a spot where multiple attempts at reading will finally get the information but where the platter surface is wearing thin and needs to have that area marked for bad sectors. When you delete the current index file, before creating a new one, boot to Safe Mode and run chkdsk /f /r and when finished, reboot and run Defrag. If the index file is straddling bad sectors, that will probably relocate it when the new one is created and not have the problem again till the new area on drive starts to go bad.

Like to establish the root cause but I'll give it a go. Thanks
Terry T.

Thanks for that. I'm going to try suggestions but I'm held up at the moment writing a paper about how dreadful Windows is as a tool for non-professionals, i.e. the intelligent general public.
It is a classic example of a spaghetti OS put together by about 100 people with no interactions. I know as I've seen such OSs before and Windows shows all these characteristics. If only it had a log of some sort, accessible and analysable by users to see exactly what has happened. Msgs like 'You cannot do this at this time' infuriate me. Why? 'Tell me please Mr Windows since you obviously know. Also kindly tell me what options I have to get round it.'
What I am talking about is in context help and diagnostics but must stop now before I blow a fuse.
Terry Tortoise

But I've authored apps and more on Windows. Over the past year I was one of the leads to move the office to W10 so why write a paper on such an old OS?

No offense, why lose time over this one? It has priors and I never found Windows Search to be that good in W7, Vista etc. Turn it off, get back to it?

Dear All, I use W7 beciause:
1. It does everything I want
2. It is user friendly
3. My wife would divorce me if I used W10 and she had to learn a new front end.
W10 (and 11, 12 ...200) still have the same unfriendliness when it come to errors. W7 to W10 is like your daily newspaper changing from English to Japanese overnight. The basic design of (PC) Windows is poor whatever front end and new gizmos - and that is from someone who has experience of proper (large systems) OSs.

With Classic Shell (free) the front end in Windows 10 is the same as it is in Windows 7 (apart from looking more austere: there's no Aero for example, and apart from a new Settings GUI, but your wife won't use that often once you configured her account to her wishes). But my Firefox, Thunderbird and even Internet Explorer look exactly the same, just like most other applications (such MS Office 2010 and Windows Media Player). Only Windows Explorer is slightly changed, but without obvious user issues.

If comparing with languages it's more like changing from UK English to USA English than from English to Japanese.

If anyone can look at a W7 screen and say it's little different from a W10 screen, then my name is Mao Tse Tung. I'll close this one (if I can) by saying that the basic design of Windows (GUIs aside -they are icing on a very poor cake.
regards to all repliers
Terry Tortoise - been there, done it etc with PROPER OSs

And had hoped to save you from yourself. If you want to dig into indexing, there's a million posts on the web. Have at it.

For me it failed too many times and I've tried all the fixes so maybe Microsoft got it working but I don't want to lose any time on this old thing.

I'll use other searches, thank you very much.

If I look at my desktop, I see a greenish screen (the same green as I had in Windows 98, in fact, because I hate changes) with shortcuts, just like in Windows 98, XP and 7. No difference at all, except that it are partly other shortcuts than it were in my Windows 7 till last June.

Below it the taskbar, with the system tray at right and icons for my favorite and the running programs at left. Five minor differences: in stead of the Start button, there's a Windows icon, running programs have a blue line under them (that's very, very nice!) and in the system tray there's a extra icon for notifications. And there are 2 new icons, for search and for task view. And, very nice, in the single row taskbar, the clock shows both the time and the date; I love that also.

When I click the Windows icon (the ex-Start-button) I get a menu that closely resembles the menu in Windows 7. An all programs button, a list of 20 programs recently run and above that a few pinned programs at left, and on the right side the usual list with Recent, Devices and Printers, Control Panel and Run and so on, and finally a button to shutdown/sleep/hibernate/logoff/go to another user.

I really had nothing at all to explain my wife, when it was all set up. She hardly noticed the change, especially since I had given her the same wallpaper on the desktop as she had in Windows 7 (our cat). Well, she called for help later when a pdf from a mail opened in Edge (Windows 10 default) in stead of Acrobat reader, but I could easily correct that.
I think that after three months using it, she yet has to see her first 'modern' tile on this PC. I wonder if she even knows how to get to them and what they can be used for.

Feel free to call yourself Mao Tse Tung now.