Last Reviewed: October 1, 2009

Article: DTS0155

Applies to: dtSearch Desktop/dtSearch Network

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

    dtSearch Web system requirements and performance?

Operating systems supported

Supported: Windows 2000 SP 4, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista (version 7.40 or later), Windows 7 (version 7.62 or later), Windows Server 2008

Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows are supported.  (Under 64-bit versions of Windows, the 64-bit executables are installed in the dtSearch bin64 folder.)

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 or later is installed on the computer.

Not supported: Windows 3.x (16-bit), Windows NT 3.51 or earlier, Windows NT 4, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 without SP 4 (due to the lack of support for these platforms in Visual Studio 2008)

Hardware Requirements

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

Installation takes about 110 megabytes of hard disk space, depending on the options selected.

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 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.