Frustrating issue with Explore's 'search' feature

In my office, I am the sole user of a Windows XP Home edition installation. While I have heard good things about XP, I am not too sold on its file search feature. Rather than search for files in whatever drive/directory I am currently looking in (as it should), the XP Explore "˜Find’ utility only allows me to "look in" useless locations: Desktop, My Computer, My Documents, and My Music(??).

None of the "˜advanced search options’, are of any use—there are just choices like case-sensitive search, Search the Internet, etc. I actually have to move to another workstation running Win2000 to perform searches. If I want to look for something on MY OWN machine, I have to go to another workstation and point BACK to my drive’s directories to perform the search. It’s pretty ridiculous. And no one in my office seems to know what to do about it. (It’s a very small office.) In my work, I frequently have to search directories for files containing particular text strings. This is driving me nuts.

I checked with a friend, who’s running XP at home, and his XP installation works in the proper way—searching by default whichever directory you happen to be in, currently. Does anyone know how I can set my XP to work this way as default?

 

Hello Walipala,

Not clear on whether your problem is with XP's search companion, your reference is to "find ", perhaps because of "windows classic look ". I use the XP look, and the terminalogy is "search" in the folder's tool bar.

The search companion will not search hidden files and folders, even if it says "search all files... ", will not search system files, will only look for files that can be created by the end user and employing registered applications.

A better search program is AgentRansack - free http://www.agentransack.com/default.aspx

Regards - Charles

 

Sorry Pete, didn't see your post.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks guys. Good catch on the 'Windows Classic' too. I am not at all fond of the XP look myself.

That agentransack site seems to be down. Hopefully it is just temporary, since I've had no luck getting Explorer to do what I want. (Search Companion & Search Assistant? -- why'd they have to make it so complicated?)

 

Hi Walipala,

Tried both the links that Pete & I gave you a few minutes ago and both worked.

"I am not at all fond of the XP look myself. "

I dual boot with a 9X system. Have to have some way to tell the difference.

Regards - Charles

 

THANKS!!

Man, that is a f**king cool little tool! Works like greased lightning too. And it'll display each line of text that contains the search string. Muchas gracias again guys.