Last Reviewed: February 2, 2007

Article: DTS0155

Applies to: dtSearch Desktop/dtSearch Network 7.21 and later

For information about dtSearch Web requirements, please see these articles:

    dtSearch Web system requirements and performance?

Operating systems supported

Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP (through SP2), Windows 2003 Server, Windows Vista (Vista requires version 7.40 or later)

Web Browser

dtSearch Desktop also requires that Internet Explorer 5 or later be installed. Internet Explorer does not have to be your default browser (you can still use Netscape, Opera, or any other browser). dtSearch just needs certain components that are only available if Internet Explorer 5, 6, or 7 is installed on the computer.

Not supported: Windows 3.x (16-bit), Windows NT 3.51 or earlier, Windows NT 4, Windows 95 (due to the lack of support for these platforms in Visual Studio .NET 2005)

Hardware Requirements

dtSearch Desktop is designed for systems with a screen resolution of 800x600 or higher.

Installation takes between 4 and 30 megabytes of hard disk space, depending on the options selected. (There is an optional thesaurus that takes about 20 Mb installed. The thesaurus is used for synonym searching.)

Additionally, you should have enough free space on the hard disk to build indexes of your documents. A dtSearch index takes about 1/3 the size of the original documents. Please see the article on Index Size for more information.

Recommended memory size is 256 Mb or more.  dtSearch itself requires about 10-20 Mb of memory to search.  Indexing can be done with as little as 30 Mb but more memory will result in faster performance.   

Performance Recommendations

1. Do not put dtSearch indexes on a compressed drive or folder. For example, do not use NTFS compression or encryption on dtSearch indexes. dtSearch indexes are internally compressed, so you will not reduce their size much, and operating system file compression can slow index access considerably. (dtSearch performance is not affected much if the documents are stored in a compressed drive or folder. It is only the indexes that should not be compressed.)

2. For best performance, use a defragmentation utility such as Diskeeper to keep your hard disk defragmented, and keep the hard disk at least 25% empty so the defragmentation utility can run efficiently.

3.  Index updates will be faster and more reliable if dtSearch Desktop runs on the machine where the index is stored.   It matters much less where the documents are located, because dtSearch just needs to read each document once to index it.   

For more information on indexing large document collections, see Optimizing indexing of large document collections.