Windows Search Behavior

[goombawaho]

I'm curious to know if the following is how I correctly analyzed this situation.

Looking for a QuickBooks file and did a search for *.QBW including Hidden & System folders on the whole C: drive. The file I was looking for was not to be found but other QB files were found in MY Documents. Turned ON Indexing service which had been disabled for quite a while and boom, it found the file in C:\Program Files\Intuit...

So, the question. Because Indexing service was turned off, windows search would NOT search in the Program Files folder and return a proper result?? This almost caused a riot by the person that needed that file.

 

[strongm]

You are much better off using the older search companion on the C drive

 

[goombawaho]

Well, that didn't exactly answer my question AND if you're talking about the little dog, I never liked the way that search appeared visually. I am NOT using windows search that comes with office (windows search 4.0). I'm using the old school windows 2000 style search built-in to XP as in the following picture.

http://www.spyordie007.com/atforums/xp_search.gif

 

[strongm]

>the old school windows 2000 style search built-in to XP

Well, that's Classic Search, and you can only get it on XP with some under-the-hood tweaking ... the default in XP is Search Companion (although you can switch the animated companion off). So you might perhaps understand why I assumed when you said 'windows search' that you actually meant Windows Search, and not Classic/Companion Search.

I'm not aware of folder exclusions with classic/companion search - although as far as I recall it won't search compressed (zip) folders.

 

[goombawaho]

No - it's cool. There are at least three search possibilities in XP.

Yeah, it was the older looking search you get by modifying the registry like this.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState]
"Use Search Asst"="no"

And the bottom line is I tried to search the whole hard drive for *.QBW and it found all of them in My Documents but not the one in C:\Program Files\Intuit...... I really don't understand.

I ended up finding it by using GetDataBack off a BartPE CD but with XP booted. I just did a search within that program for *.qbw and there it was. Not even a search for deleted files, so that gives me a new tool when search results don't make sense.

 

[IndianaSkinny]

Since you are talking about "old school" searches, when I do a search and the results just don't make sense, and the file would not be in a zip, I will go to the really old school search...

Assuming my file will be on C drive:
Open a command window and change to root
c:\...> cd c:\>dir /s *.qbw

 

[goombawaho]

Oh man, I can't be bothered with non-GUI searches at a DOS prompt. Well, I guess I could, but it annoys me that Windows search let me down.