I don’t know what need/problem Windows Search is supposed to be filling/solving. It never seems to be able to help me find a file when I’m not sure where it is. I believe this is caused by Windows trying to “save me from myself”. That is, they always assume I only want to listen to music, look at pictures, or watch a movie.
But I finally figured away around them today! To find a file, open a command prompt and use “dir”. Don’t know why it never occurred to me before lol.
For instance here is a search for pst files which for some reason Windows Search did not want to show me:
C:\>dir /S mail200*.pst
To open a command prompt just go to the search or run box and type “cmd” without the quotes.
This particular command with switches could be described as, “list all the pst files in any directory under the root that start with mail200”.
This was one my three major complaints about Windows Vista/7. I’m glad to have a workaround now. The other two are file/folder move/copy problems, and the horrible default folder column formats (where all of my files show how many stars they have rather than modified date/time, type and size).
