How do I add search filters?

We’re a small software companywww.200words-a-day.com. Each of our courses usually contains around 20,000 files. With various courses under construction, we frequently used the XP search facility, looking for files that an artist or sound recorder had sent us. If we set the filter to >1Kb, it switched off all the annoyingRecently Used shortcut links that clog up the results. We prudently avoided Vista, too many Runtime errors.

Let’s suppose the files I’m looking for is Xmas2.exe, I search for Xmas using Windows 7**.**Only two filters are offered in searching from the current Explorer directory being viewed (a fact that’s well documented on this URL) so I’ll use the flying windows key + F that lists all filters. My Name search produced 3 names (one of these a Recently Used Shortcut) in a time of (yawn) 80 seconds. The file I’m looking for obviously isn’t there.

So I search again for**Xmas,**using a downloaded application Everything from http://www.voidtools.com/ and find 13 items, including the file I’m looking for, in less than a second.

The Windows 7 search GUI is absolutely appalling, the search times are incredibly slow (possibly I could speed them up if I spent the time to discover how to keep file indexes updated), Microsoft are not in the least bit concerned and alarmingly, the results are inaccurate.

I’m also having problems Moving files, Windows 7 often Copies instead of moving and occasionally deletes the file rather than Moving it. I’ve a couple of other minor complaints but all in all, a very good operating system with lots of inovative features and far superior to its predecessors.

thanks for the links (Dave), however I need to search for a string in file content (not name) in my *.vb files in a non indexed folder. Resources to find out how to do it are in sparse forums. It takes hours understanding the behaviour of the search tool, search ingforums, testing filters. I am software engineer, I can imagine the result for a basic user ! What I had to do:

• figure out where the search windows has gone and where are search option
• find the search options, find how to show the menu in the windows explorer to access this from folder options
• discover that if you cannot index a folder (too big to be indexed in a resonable delay), windows search won't search by content
• find that filter key names exist. Only two of them visible in the drop down search box. Impossible to search for a period between two dates and to search by content
• find that if you redo the search clicking on the bottom of search result, reselecting your folder, you can get more keyword that appear in the search box, like the "type". Still nothing for the content
• find that other non documented (in windows help) keywords exist for search by content
• find the syntax in a forum (in english). Then you are happy to find the famous "content:". Then find why it doesn't work: if your OS is not english the keywords are translated !
• guess keyword translation when you don't find advanced search documentation in your language
• in the end you find that your search: "content:function AND type:*.vb" doesn't work doesn't return any result (I translated the search string), even if it should do
• you give up, download a search tool like baregrep and you have all your results very fast (no need to read any documentation to do it)

Please do something !

PS: In such a great OS like win7 , do you think it is reasonable to come to this end ?

By the way, this work around is ridiculous. 

Especially compared to how easy it used to be to do helpful searches.

Why don't you read

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx

which tells you...

date:>2/7/05<2/10/05

--

Dave N.

MS-MVP (Mail)

Windows 7 Ultimate 64

Get it: http://download.live.com/wlmail

Get Help: http://www.windowslivehelp.com/product.aspx?productid=15

"nando romero" wrote in message

news:*** Email address is removed for privacy ***...

No! It does not help! How do you set a date range? Why don't you continue

reading the thread so you can see how many people are complaining about the

same problem?

Windows 7 Ultimate 64