Windows 10 Win10 Explorer search never completes

[WonderWoman]

Hello,

I have been having this problem on my Win 10 laptop for years. When I try to search in explorer the search never completes - the bar just barely makes it to the end and the search just "hangs". This has been happening on my old W10 Home both regular and insider preview and now on a brand new fresh install of Win10 Pro. I am a help desk support person for 25 years and I must admit this has me totally "befuddled". Anyone ever see this before? What could be causing it? How can I fix it? My laptop is an old 2011 HP DV7 with 16 GB RAM and a new 1TB SSD (Samsung EVO) with a secondary physical mechanical 2TB drive and both drives have plenty of extra room.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Wonder Woman

 

[DVDR_Dog]

So WW we have gone down this path before.
Here's the scoop:
You did something to these systems to make them act like this. You can swear up and down that you never did, that's a common refrain at your help desk I am sure. I hear it ALL the time.
Windows doesn't do these things all by itself. It's not that smart. There is an outside possibility you have packed so many files on your system and perhaps indexing was disabled. A very outside chance and if your systems are as robust as you state, things should not have halted in a stalled condition.
So WW follow these directions:

Fix File Explorer Search Not Working in Windows 10 - Troubleshooter

Fix File Explorer Search Not Working in Windows 10: If you have recently searched for some particular files or folders in the File Explorer search and the search results doesn't bring up anything then it can be problem related to File Explorer Search Not Working and in order to make sure this is...

troubleshooter.xyz

.

If by oft chance you have Cortana enabled please get rid of it. M/S has already started dumping AI and has all but coincided defeat. Cortana just places a worthless load on the system resources including the search function.

So I see we are more or less neighbors WW. So no trying to BS me now, capisci WW?

Thumper has listed some dandy file search programs on here. I suggest you check them out once you get your Windows issue cleared up.
Or even better try our member cndps program.
Find it in here:

Release Version 2.0.3 · stefankueng/grepWin

issues done for this release: https://github.com/stefankueng/grepWin/milestone/5?closed=1

github.com