How to speed up Windows 7 search?

Use launchy in Windows 7 too. It works perfectly fine, and you get the same responsiveness.

What do instant search results sound like ?

If your hard disk is ntfs, you can use the Everything search engine, and it's free.

Check your indexing options, if you only index the locations you really need to search things in and disable all the extensions except the one you are looking for then searching will be a lot faster than the default settings.

For example, you can start of with indexing your start menu (thus also .LNK files) and your music folder (thus also .MP3 files), then search for a shortcut or one of your favourite songs, you will notice the difference! Now it's just a mather of adding the locations and extensions of your interests.

Please note that your stuff should be a bit organized, there is no sense in configuring your indexing options if all your files are all over the disk. Your stuff should reside in C:\Users\YourUserName\ to start off with, from there it should be categorized by type (Documents, Music, ...), then by section (Projects, Old, ...) and so on...

In that way you can add your projects to the search while your old stuff doesn't slow down your searching experience, just to show you a bit of organization goes a long way!

If above suggestions don't help you might have one or another process eating up all of your CPU or I/O bandwidth causing your computer to be slow so it won't index and search as fast as it should be supposed to be, nothing wrong with the indexer itself. It goes blazing fast here...