Should Rebuilding the Indexes on a 2T hard drive take 3 days?

[morlaine]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 64-bit laptop, running windows 10 latest version, 8 mb memory, 2 T hard drive.
I ran Avast cleanup Premium and was very careful about what I deleted. I made a backup of my registry file before doing this. I also ran a duplicate files program and manually deleted any large duplicate files it found.
After this, my computer started running slow when I did searches in File Explorer.
After doing some reading on the internet, I decided that maybe I should rebuild the indexes. I followed the instructions about going to the Control Panel and doing it from there. Surprisingly, a very simple process.
I started this in the evening and had nothing else running on the laptop. I figured it would run overnight, since I have a large hard drive. I have 226 gigs of free space on the drive, so it has a lot of files. I can't find a place that gives me the number of files on the hard drive and that surprises me. I would have expected a catalog entry to show that. Hmmm.
Anyway, it is now the middle of the third day and it is still running.
The display in the little box is confusing because it says 470,436 items indexed and that number is increasing. However, the next line in the display box says Indexing complete. So guys, what am I looking at and which line is correct?

Does it just continue Reindexing the files over and over until I stop it manually? I have done hardly anything on my laptop, maybe less than 15 minutes of work, since I started running the Rebuild Index.
And is there a way for me to know, at least a guesstimate, of how many files are on my laptop?
Thank you for any suggestions/answers you can give. I'd really like my laptop back.

 

[Wolfie]

Hi morlaine,

I would choose a recovery point and reset your PC to that, please read the following link for why you shouldn't use registry clean-up tools:

https://www.howtogeek.com/171633/why-using-a-registry-cleaner-wont-speed-up-your-pc-or-fix-crashes/

Long story short, they often cause more problems than they solve!.

 

[morlaine]

Thanks for the info on registry cleaners. Guess I won't do that again. Laptops are not my forte, before I retired mainframes were my thing, probably before your time. I don't even know if mainframes still exist.
I somehow solved the problem with Rebuilding the Indexes or at least gave up beating my head against the wall. Sometimes, you just have to know when to fold 'em.
I was checking the count of the files being indexed and about 2am the count dropped back a few hundred files and started increasing again. It was in some kind of loop. So I stopped the indexing, rebooted the laptop, and started the Rebuild Index again. Somehow, it got back into that same loop again this morning, 9 hours later. So I just stopped it. Hope I didn't make things worse.
I wonder if Microsoft knows there might be a bug in their indexing program, or do they care?
I'm going to stop worrying about it and hope for the best.

 

[Wolfie]

Hi morlaine,

if you used a reg cleaner, you may well have corrupted your system registry, do you have any restore points?, try using one of those and recover your PC from there!.

I wonder if Microsoft knows there might be a bug in their indexing program, or do they care?
I'm going to stop worrying about it and hope for the best.

 

[davehc]

Not a solution, but a suggestion.
I have removed everything from the search index, manually.
I have installed a small utility, which I have used for some years, called Everything:

https://www.voidtools.com/

This little wonder works at an incredible speed, when searching, and offers little perqs not available in the Windows search facility.

The same program is used by a couple of other members in the forum.

You can pint it to the taskbar, in place of the MS search, for ease of use.