Searching in Windows 7
I have been running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on one of my two main PCs for about 3-4 weeks now. I like it, it seems like an improvement from Windows XP and Vista (admittedly, I only worked on Vista part-time and only felt the real pain when having to figure out how to do things on my wife’s PC and my test virtual machines).
I really want to like the Windows 7 search. It certainly allows you to perform more, faster, and more thorough searches than previous Windows versions. It is also far more versatile. It’s just really unintuitive if you want to do anything other than the default. I want to try to use it as much as possible; sometimes new features turn out better than your first impression once you really use them.
Thus far, I ran into a couple of gotchas, and here are solutions to both:
- Searching full local drives
I typed the file name into the search window for example:
msxml6.dll
Out of the box, this returned all documents containing that file name as text, but not the locations of that file on my PC, such as the Windows system32 folder. The problem was that the predefined libraries did not include my complete local hard drives, but only some predefined locations, such as My Documents, Music and Videos. As a programmer, I often search for the locations of specific files on my entire local drive(s), just to make sure I don’t have a stray copy in the wrong place.
I added a new library named All Local Drives and added C: and D: (both local drives) to it. Now the search finds all copies of this file on both local drives, as well as all files that contain the file name as text.
Caution: Your libraries are also used as default locations for the built-in Windows backup, so adding more locations as libraries for searches will also back up those locations by default. You can go in and change locations to back up in Control Panel > Backup and Restore.
I had expected this to be automatic after adding C: and D: to my indexed locations in Control Panel > Indexed Locations.
Caution: By default, Windows will exclude some locations such as the Windows and AppData folders from the Index and it’s quite cumbersome to even figure out what some of these locations are and include them. This really ought to be simpler!
Update: It turns out that this issue is far worse than I thought. Please see Searching in Windows 7 part 2 for more.
- Filtering searches
You can use a filter to constrain the search results to only display files, and not files containing the text. For example:
msxml6.dll type:=.dll
Now the search finds all copies of this file on both local drives, but not files that contain the file name as text.
- Searching multiple Exchange mailboxes
I have a personal mailbox on our Exchange server, but I also have access to 2 additional mailboxes that I frequently need to find emails in. Windows 7 does not allow me to search these additional mailboxes.
I had really hoped not having to install Google desktop on my Windows 7 machine (why use two searches if one will do?), but this item is a big deal to me and that was ultimately the solution.