First of all, and as you know, my working system is XP, and with "only" 2 giga of memory; I acknowledge that in/for 2015, this is decidedly sub-standard.

But then, as you know, too, there have been several threads here in this forum, and many more elsewhere, which treat the incredible sub-standardness of FireFox, re its inexistent memory management.

As said, I'm not into defamation, so I have to admit that in part, my probs could come from Avira free (formerly, I had used Avast free, even more intruding than Avast free), and also, I have to admit that my probs started with the very latest Adobe Flash update (16), which they offered in order to overcome (again, and, felt, for the 1,000th time) "security" probs.

I had installed that Flash 16, and then, after opening just SOME tabs in FF, I quickly not only ran out of memory, but had my system stalled for good, up to killing FF "process" by Win Task Manager, and by thus losing any tab = all the work I previously had put into searching for url's, links, etc. - it should be obvious for any reader that by opening some 12 or 15 tabs from search and links in previous "hits", you've got some "work done", which is quite awful to lose then.

I've always said, "you get what you pay for", and I've always acknowledged there are just SOME exception to that rule, but then, ALL of my experience backs this up, to 99.5 (= not: 99,9) p.c. of all cases, this rule applies perfectly, and FireFox seems to be the perfect example of TOTAL CRAP, delivered by some "volunteers", who like the idea that they are "giving out something valid for free", when in fact, they tell us, hey, dude, I know I cannot sell my shit, but ain't you willing to swallow it for free? Of course, I'm opening this thread not in order to defame FF, but in order to get new ideas about how to do things better, this whole forum being about that, right?

Thus, my very first reaction to FF being stalled* by that infamous Flash update was to deactivate Flash, and to observe things coming from that, for some week or so. Here I've got news for you: Flash, except for YT, is totally unnecessary, AND it's omnipresent (= "ubiquitous"), i.e. almost ANY web site, as poor-in-content or modest in scope it might be, there's virtually ALWAYS that line above my FF content window, "Do you allow FF to activate Flash for this site?" (or something like that, DC NOT doing this shit).

*= Of course, I've got plenty of room for "virtual memory M" by Windows, on c: (since my data, as said, is on some external hdd), and "virtual memory is managed by the system") - but notwithstanding, even if I allow a quarter of an hour (!!!) for any command to become effective, I always end up by killing the FF "process", after HOURS of waiting. At the same time, all other applications functions "quite normally", i.e. they respond to commands, but with that little delay you'd expect by my system's having replaced working memory by multiple hdd accesses, considering FF has eaten all the working memory. It's just FF that doesn't respond any at all.

And fact is, in more than a week, I NEVER had to tell FF to activate Flash, in order to get ANY useful info, from any of those several hundred pages all begging for Flash. (It's understood that for JavaScript, the situation is totally different: If you don't allow for JS, almost any web page of today will not work anymore, in any acceptable way. But again, don't mix up JS and Flash; JS having become a literally unavoidable "standard", whilst Flash is a simple nuisance, except for YT, and then, for rare cases in which you want to see some embedded "film" - IS propaganda? No thanks, and all the rest, no thank you either; let alone for indecently idiotic porn.)

Back to FF: My getting rid of Flash did NOT solve my probs. It's invariably "CPU 100 p.c." over hours, with Flash de-activated though, and as soon as I've got opened more than just 10 or 12 FF tabs; I assume these are JS scripts running, but then, even after MANY minutes, FF never tells me, "that JS is running, should we stop it?".

I have to say that I know about the existence of "NoScript for FF", but then, it's not obvious how to run that NS in some smooth way, just in order to intercept too-demanding scripts whenever they dare run, but leaving alone any menu "scripting" anywhere; do you

I wish to confirm again that I'm NOT speaking of porn or other crap sites, but that I'm just "surfing" among the most innocuous web sites you could imagine.

As for Flash, before deactivating Flash for good, I had tried Chrome, and I had the very unpleasant experience that with Chrome, and that incredible shit of Flash 16, all was as incredible awful as with FF and that incredible shit of Flash 16 (sic), if not worse (!), so it's obvious that Flash 16 is even worse than FF 36 (or was it 35? it's the current version all the same), but then, Chrome will allow your killing ONE tab running, whilst in FF, it's "all or nothing", i.e. if you decide to kill the FF "process", you will lose all your "search" work, too (since FF stalls your FF process (i.e. not your system as a whole, so it's obvious it's all a matter of FF's memory management), so it's not even possible to switch from one tab to another one in order to retrieve the respective url's, even manually).

Btw., WITH that incredible Flash 16, simple Flash sites (which in fact would not have even needed Flash to begin with, see above) brought FF to 1200 meg, then 1,500, then 2,000, 3,500 meg... in fact, Flash's memory demands are simply unlimited, and that's confirmed not currently (I admit), but from Flash users' experience back in August, 2014, i.e. some few Flash versions ago, and who say Flash of summer 2014 asked for unlimited memory, 6 giga, 8 gia, 10 giga... they were on systems of 8 or 16 giga of working memory, and they thought it was unbearable...

The only reason I cling to FF is the fact that "YouTube Video and Audio Downloader" is available for FF only (i.e. not Chrome), and that it's the ONLY YT downloader of my knowledge which lets you select best AUDIO quality, too (and not only best video quality, as its competitors do, at best) - but in the end, you can perfectly use FF for this YT downloading, whilst using Chrome for anything else, so that's "no reason".

Hence :

- Except for very limited usage (YT), Flash is totally useless and, short of viruses, the utmost nuisance on pc (or Mac) (and as usual, Jobs was first to identify this problem, AND to resolve it, for much of the systems he's been marketing)
- ( Similar things could be said about the really ridiculous and useless Adobe pdf viewer, but that's another story. )
- FF is to be considered liquid, stinking, green, morbid shit: If not even in iteration 36, software meets most basic standards, it will probably not meet them in iteration 100 either
- Chrome is "free", too, but we all know you pay with all your data... BUT: At least there, you KNOW WHAT price you pay for their "free" service, whilst FF "do it all benevolently", and obviously serve you perfect crap (whatever the reasons of FF being totally stuck, with 2 giga of work memory, and plenty of "virtual memory", your only alternative is to kill FF throughout if ever you want to get rid of some "CPU 100 p.c." over many, many minutes, with no end, instead of killing JUST SOME tabs going bonkers, is kindergarten)
- And yes, Avira free could be "in it" to some degree, too (= I had less problems, even with FF, when I "surfed" without any "protection") (but Avast free was really "unbearable", by their pop-ups (i.e. at least, I thought so, before my current problems with FF)... but perhaps, function-wise, they would always be preferable to Avira free, which is less intruding re pop-ups, but doesn't work as well with FF, then?)
- Any insight into NoScript for FF? Is there a chance to get it to stop JS scripts running amok but letting go of any "regular" JS script anywhere?

Your opinion/advice/experience is highly welcome.

EDIT:

Sorry, my mistake above, I just read:

"Allow www.donationcoder.com to run "Adobe Flash"?" - Should we not enter some overdue discussion re "Are site developers trying to do Flash even in pure-text pages utterly nuts?", right now?

...are not that superior either?

This is a spin-off from https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=40074.0 discussing MR update from 5 to 6.

"I'm a big fan of macrium reflect.  Very fast, very stable, no bloat."

MR seems to be the premier backup-and-recovery sw on the market as far as the paid version is concerned (which is discussed above).

As for their free version, though, I only can encourage possible users to refrain from it, not because it was really bad (in fact, I never knew and don't know), but because it does not seem to offer any functionality going beyond what less-renowned competitors offer, in their respective free versions, or more precisely, it does offer even less than they do.

In fact, I went back to Paragon Backup and Recovery Free, where I can start to reinstall of my backup from within running Windows (which for that is than ended, then Linux will loaded for the rewrite of c: (or whatever), and then Windows is loaded again) - why should I fiddle around with doing lots of things manually, with MR (Free) if I can have this repeated os swapping, both by Paragon or EaseUS (and perhaps by others), done automatically?

MR (Free), on the other hand, did the backup (onto my hdd), and when I tried to reinstall that backup (after some bad experiences, I do such tries immediately after the original backup now, not weeks or months afterwards and hoping for the best in-between), it told me I didn't have an external reinstall device (or whatever they call it) from which to run the backup.

After this quite negative experience with MR (Free), I'm musing, of course, why MR (paid) is touted the way it is, since from the moment on you're willing to pay, you'll get incremental/differential backup/restore, from their competitors, too (Paragon, EaseUS and also Acronis: this latter I never touched, having read about very bad experiences from other users, allegedly having lost data with Acronic, and with several versions that is).

Also, MR did not seem anything "fast" to me, not faster than Paragon or EaseUS anyway, and at least for Paragon, I can say it's perfectly stable (I once lost data with their partition tool, but that was my fault, triggered by quite awful, quite ambiguous visuals in the respective Paragon program: So today I use Paragon for backup and EaseUS for partitioning).

And as an aside, MR even has got its own wikipedia entry, of which the wikipedia staff is far from being happy (and they say so), and which contains some direct links to the MR site where you would have expected links to less seller-specific info.

And to say it all, MR, on their homepage, currently advises you to update from 4 to 5, whilst above, it's said that 6 is imminent (?), and that updating from 5 to 6 is NOT free for v. 5 owners.

All this makes me think that perhaps MR do some very good pr and are able to create some hype, whilst at the end of the day, it's just a very regular, decent product which succeeded in realizing higher prices than their competitors are able to realize, by that hype.

If MR (paid) really has some usp(s), please name them; their free version at least is a lesser thing than their contenders' free products.

This is a spin-off of page 32 (!) of this thread https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2434.775 ,

since I don't think real info should be buried within page 32 or 33 of a someday gross-page-long thread of which readers will perhaps read page 1, and then the very last (pages) only; on the other hand, even buried on some page 32, wrong and/or incomplete "info" should not be left unattended.
____________________

Re searching:

Read my posts in http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5593

(re searching, and re tagging, the latter coming with the 260 chars for path plus filename limitations of course if you wanna do it within the file name... another possibly good reason to "encode" tags, in some form of .oac (Organisation(al things) - Assurances - Cars), instead of "writing them out")

Among other things, I say over there that you are probably well advised to use different tools for different search situations, according to the specific strengths of those tools; this is in accordance with what users say over here in the above DC thread.

Also, note that just searching within subsets of data is not only a very good idea for performance reasons (File Locator et al.), but also for getting (much) less irrelevant results: If you get 700 "hits", in many instances, it's not really a good idea to try to narrow down by adding further "AND" search terms, since that would probably exclude quite some relevant hits; narrowing down to specific directories would probably be the far better ("search in search") strategy; btw, another argument for tagging, especially for additional, specific tagging of everything that is in the subfolder into which it "naturally" belongs, but which belongs into alternative contexts, too (ultimately, a better file system should do this trick).

(Citations from the above page 32:)

Armando: "That said, I always find it weird when Everything is listed side by side with other software like X1, DTSearch or Archivarius. It's not the  same thing at all! Yes, most so called "Desktop search" software will be able to search file names (although not foldernames), but software like Everything won't be able to search file content." - Well said, I run into this irresponsible stew again and again; let's say that with "Everything" (and with Listary, which just integrates ET for this functionality), the file NAME search problem has definitely been resolved, but that does not resolve our full text search issues. Btw, I'm sure ET has been mentioned on pages 1 to 31 of that thread over and over again, and it's by nature such overlong threads will treat the same issues again and again, again and again giving the same "answers" to those identical problems, but of course, this will not stop posters who try to post just the maximum of post numbers, instead of trying to shut up whenever they can not add something new to the object of discussion. (I have said this before: Traditional forum sw is not the best solution for technical fora (or then, any forum), some tree-shaped sw (integrating a prominent subtree "new things", and other "favorites" sub-trees) would have been a thousand times better, and yes, such a system would obviously expose such overly-redundant, just-stealing-your-time posts. (At 40hz: Note I never said 100 p.c. of your posts are crap, I just say 95 or more p.c. of them are... well, sometimes they are quite funny at least, e.g. when a bachelor tries to tell fathers of 3 or 4 how to rise children: It's just that some people know-it-all, but really everything, for every thing in this life and this world, they are the ultimate expert - boys of 4 excel in this, too.)

Innuendo on Copernic: Stupid bugs, leaves out hits that should be there. I can confirm both observations, so I discarded this crap years before, and there is no sign things would have evolved in the right direction over there in the meantime, all to the contrary (v3>v4, OMG).

X1: See jity2's instructive link: http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=9638) . My comment, though: X1's special option which then finds any (? did you try capitals, too, and "weird" non-German/French accented chars?) accented char, by just entering the respective base char, is quite ingenious (and new info for me, thank you!), and I think it can be of tremendous help IF it works "over" all possible file formats (but I so much doubt this!), and without fault, just compare with File Locator's "handling" (i.e. in fact mis-treating) accented chars even in simple .rtf files (explained in the outliner thread) - thus, if X1 found (sic, I don't dare say "finds") all these hits, by simply entering "relevement", for finding "relèvement" (which could, please note, have been wrongly written rélèvement" in some third-party source text within your "database" / file-system-based data repository, which detail would make you would not find it by entering the correct wording), this would be a very strong argument for using X1, and you clearly should not undervalue this feature, especially since you're a Continental and by this will probably have stored an enormous amount of text bodies containing accented chars, and which rather often will have accent errors within those original texts.

X1 again, a traditional problem of X1 not treated here: What about its handling of OL (Outlook) data? Not only that ancient X1 versions did not treat such data well, but far worse, X1 was deemed, by some commentators, to damage OL files, which of course would be perfectly inacceptable. What about this? I can't trial (neither buy, which I would have done, otherwise) the current X1 version, with my XP Win version, and it might be this obvious X1-vs.-OL problem has been resolved in the meantime (but even then, the question would remain which OL versions would possibly be affected even then? X1-current vs. OL-current possibly ok, but X1-current vs. OL-ancient-versions =?!). I understand that few people would be sufficiently motivated to trial this upon their real data, but then, better trial this, with let's say a replication of your current data, put onto an alternative pc, instead of runningg the risk that even X1-current will damage any OL data on your running system, don't you think so? (And then, thankfully, share your hopeful all-clear signal, or then, your warnings, in case - which would of course be a step further, not necessarily included within your first step of verifying...)

Innuendo on X1 vs. the rest, and in particular dtSearch:

"X1 - Far from perfect, but the absolute best if you use the criteria above as a guideline. Sadly, it seems they are very aware of being the best and have priced their product accordingly. Very expensive...just expensive enough to put it over the line of insulting. If you want the best, you and your wallet will be oh so painfully aware that you are paying for the best."

"dtSearch - This is a solution geared towards corporations and the cold UI and barely there acceptable list of features make this an unappetizing choice for home users. I would wager they make their bones by providing lucrative support plans and willingness to accept company purchase orders. There are more capable, less expensive, more efficient options available."

This cannot stay uncommented since it's obviously wrong in some respects, from my own trialling both; of course, if X1 has got some advantages (beyond the GUI, which indeed is much better, but then, some macroing for dtSearch could probably prevent some premature decision like jity2's one: "In fact after watching some videos about it, I won't try it because I don't use regex for searching keywords, and because the interface seems not very enough user friendly (I don't want to click many times just to do a keyword search !)."), please tell us!

First of all, I can confirm that both developers have (competent) staff (i.e. no comparison with the usual "either it's the developer himself, or some incompetent (since not trained, not informed, not even half-way correctly paid "Indian"") that is really and VERY helpful, in giving information, and in discussing features, or even lack of features, both X1 and dtSearch people are professional and congenial, and if I say dtSearch staff is even "better" than X1 staff, this, while being true, is not to denigrate X1 staff: we're discussing just different degrees of excellence here. (Now compare with Copernic.)

This being said, X1 seems to be visually-brilliant sw for standard applics, whilst dtSearch FINDS IT ALL. In fact, when trialling, I did not encounter any exotic file format from which I wasn't able to get the relevant hits, whilst in X1, if it was not in their (quite standard file format) list, it was not indexed, and thus was not found: It's as simple as that. (Remember the forensic objectives of dtSearch, but it's exactly this additional purpose of it that makes it capable of searching lots of even quite widespread file formats where most other (index-based) desktop search tools fail.

Also, allow for a brief divagation into askSam country: The reason some people cling to it, is the rarity of full-text "db's" able to find numerics. Okay, okay, any search tool can find "386", be it as part of a "string", or even as a "word" (i.e. as a number, or as part of a number), but what about "between 350 and 400"? Okay, okay, you can try (and even succeed, in part), with regex (= again, dtSearch instead of X1). But askSam does this, and similar, with "pseudo-fields", and normally, for such tasks, you need "real" db's for this, and as we all know, for most text-heavy data, people prefer text-based sw, instead of putting it all into relational db's. As you also know, there are some SQLite/other-db-based 2-pane outliners / basic IMS' that have got additional "columns" in order to get numeric data into, but that's not the same (, and even within there, searching for numeric data RANGES is far from evident).

Now that's for numeric ranges in db's, and now look into dtSearch's possibilities of identifying numeric ranges in pseudo-fields in "full text", similar to askSam, and you will see the incredible (and obviously, again, regex-driven) power of dtSearch.

Thus, dear Innuendo, your X1 being "the absolute best" is perfectly unsustainable, but it's in order to inform you better that I post this, and not at all in order to insinuate you had known better whilst writing the above.

____________________

Re ntfs file numbers:

jity2 in the above DC thread: "With CDS V3.6 size of the index was 85 Go with about 2,000,000 files indexed (Note: In one hdd drive I even hit the NTFS limit : too much files to handle !) . It took about 15 days to complete 24/24 7/7." Note: the last info is good to know... ;-(

It's evident 2 million (!) files cannot reach any "NTFS limit" but if you do lots of things completety wrong, and if you persistently left out 3 zeros, it would have been 8.6 (or, with the XP number, 4.3, but nothing near 2.0:)

eVista on

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/772dbf1a-536c-47d3-8a8d-f773c90b8a5e/maximum-number-of-files-allowed-to-exist-per-ntfs-volume-under-windows-vista-32bit-home-premium?forum=itprovistaapps :

"In short, the absolute limit on the number of files per NTFS volume seems to be 2 at the 32nd power minus 1*, but this would require 512 byte sectors and a maximum file size limit of one file per sector. Therefore, in practice, one has to calculate a realistic average file size and then apply these principles to that file size."

Note: That would be a little less than 4.3 (i.e. 2power32-1) billion files (for Continentals: 4,3 Milliarden/milliards/etc.), for XP, whilst it's 2power64-1 for Vista on, i.e. slightly less than 8.6 billion files.

EDIT: OF COURSE THAT IS NOT TRUE: The number you get everywhere is 2power32 = slightly less than 4.3 billion files, and I read that's for XP, whilst from Vista on, it would be double of that, which would make it a little less than 8.6 indeed (I cannot confirm this of course), and that would then be 2power33, not 64 (I obviously got lead astray by Win32/64 (which probably is behind that doubling though)).

No need to list all the google finds, just let me say that with "ntfs file number" you'll get the results you need, incl. wikipedia, MS...

But then, special mention to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-and-large-volumes-of-files-and-directories

with an absolutely brilliant "best answer", and then also lots of valuable details further down that page.

I think this last link will give you plenty of ideas how to better organize your stuff, but anyway, no search tool whatsoever should choke by some "2,000,000 limit", ntfs or otherwise.