Locating Stuff with Windows XP

Computers store lots and lots of stuff. As long as you’re churning out the stuff, life goes along pretty easily. Sooner or later, though, the time comes when you have to find some stuff the right stuff and that’s when the stuff hits the fan. Windows XP includes a powerful search feature with a cute name Search Companion and a cloying mascot, a mutt called Rover. This article explains how to make Rover sit up, heel, fetch, and . . . play dead. Introducing the Search Companion If you choose Start -> Search, you bring the Search Companion to life, with Rover sitting ever-so-patiently at the bottom of the pane, tail wagging, waiting to help you fetch whatever you like. (The end of this article explains how to make Rover disappear.) If the Search Companion screen looks familiar, it should. In fact, Search Companion is a pane inside Windows Explorer. What you can find When you bring up the Search Companion by choosing Start -> Search or clicking the Search icon in any Windows Explorer window. Rover offers to search for the following:

 -  Pictures, music, or video: Choosing this option leads Rover to ask whether you want to limit your search to Pictures and Photos, Music, and/or Video. You can check as many check boxes as you like; if you don’t check any, Windows assumes that you want to check them all. Windows then runs a full search “Looking for Files and Folders,” Note that the contents of the file don’t matter: Windows XP doesn’t look inside the file to see if it contains, oh, a JPEG image, for example. The Search Companion cares about only the filename extension.

 -  Documents (word processing, spreadsheet, and so on): Like the Pictures, Music, or Video option, choosing Documents leads to a full search, limited to the specific filename extensions.

 -  All files and folders: This leads to the full search described in the section, “Looking for Files and Folders.”

 -  Computers or people: The computer side of this search (assuming you leave the computer name box empty) is identical to choosing Start -> My Network Places and clicking View Workgroup Computers. The people side of the search leads to your Outlook Express (not Outlook) address book. From there, you can also use OE’s crude interface to look in the Bigfoot, VeriSign, or WhoWhere directories. Don’t bother using Start -> Search to find people on the Internet. As of this writing, two of the three options don’t work very well: The VeriSign directory is very tiny, and the Bigfoot directory automatically redirects to AT&T’s AnyWho lookup site. If you’re serious about finding somebody on the Web, use one of the standard search engines: www.anywho. com works well, as do people.yahoo.com and www.whowhere.lycos.com.  

-  Information in Help and Support Center: This option opens up the Help and Support Center, precisely the same as if you had chosen Start -> Help and Support Center. What you can’t find Surprisingly, Windows XP Search Companion doesn’t search Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail messages unless you turn on the Indexing Service. If you want to look for text in a message, or even a message Subject line, Windows XP can’t do it. Phrasing a search query You have two different, almost mutually exclusive, ways to ask a computer to look things up:

 -  Keyword searches: These searches take the words you specify and look for those words. In some cases, keyword searches can be augmented by qualifiers like AND or NOT. So you may have the Search Companion look for files with the names blue or dolphin, and you get back a list of files with either blue or dolphin, or both, in their names.

 -  Natural language searches: These searches, on the other hand, expect you to ask a question in the form of a question (with apologies to Alex Trebek). Thus, you might ask your computer, What color are dolphins? and get back a list of Web sites that discuss dolphins’ colors. Windows XP’s Search Companion combines both search methods, but in a very specific way. If you’re looking for Web sites, you’re expected to ask a question that is, Windows uses a natural language search approach when going out to the Internet. For everything else, you should type only keywords. It’s an odd dichotomy that you may find irritating, or confusing, or both.

Looking for Files and Folders

Maybe you need to find all of the handouts you typed for your Porcine Prevaricators seminar. Maybe you remember that you have a recipe with tarragon in it, but you can’t remember where in the world you put it. Maybe you accidentally moved or deleted all of the pictures of your trip to Cancun, or Windows Media Player suddenly can’t find your MP3s of the 1974 Grateful Dead tour. Good. You’re in the right place. People generally go looking for files or folders on their computers for one of two reasons. Perhaps they vaguely remember that they used to have something maybe a Christmas letter, a product description, or a great joke and now they can’t remember where they put it.

Or they have been playing around with Windows Explorer, and whatever they thought was sitting in a specific place isn’t there any more. In either case, the solution is to make Windows XP do the work and go searching for your lost files or folders. If you choose Start -> Search, the Search Companion dog Rover gives you a chance to narrow down your search, in advance, by choosing Pictures, Music or Video, or Documents. If you know in advance what kind of file you’re looking for, those choices can hone in on specific file types. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, though, it’s just as easy to go straight to the full-fledged search the choice marked All Files and Folders. Can you remember what’s in the file you’re looking for? Can you remember at least part of the file’s name? Nine times out of ten, that’s all you need. The best approach to performing a simple search depends on whether you know for an absolute, dead-certain fact what kind of file you’re dealing with. Here’s how it works, in the best of all possible worlds. Searching for pictures, music, or video Here’s what to do if you know for an absolute, dead-certain fact that the file you want is a picture, photo, music file, and/or video:

1. Choose Start -> Search. You see Rover or something like him (or, if you’re lucky, nothing at all!).

2. Click Pictures, Music, or Video. You see the Search pane.

3. Select the kind of file you’re looking for. If you know anything at all about the file, type it in the box marked All or Part of the File Name. Windows is a whole lot smarter than this dialog box would have you believe. For example, if you search for Music files and you type Ludwig in the box, Windows will find Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, even though Ludwig doesn’t appear in the filename. Try it. You’ll see. All of the advanced search options described in the section “Digging Deeper with Advanced Searches” are available by choosing Use Advanced Search Options.

4. If you don’t find the file you want, crank up the Windows Media Player and see whether you can find it from there. Searching for a document Here’s what to do if you are absolutely, completely certain that the file you want is a document which is to say a text file (with the .txt filename extension), Word document (.doc), Excel workbook (.xls), PowerPoint presentation (.ppt or .pps), or one of the other documents:

1. Choose Start -> Search.

2. Click Documents (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and so on). 3. Tell Rover how to narrow down the search. If you can remember the last time that the document was modified not created, or opened, but changed click the appropriate button. There’s no wiggle-room. If you select the Within the Last Week check box, and you last modified the file eight days ago, it won’t show up in the search. If you can remember any part of the filename, type it in the box. The Search Companion matches any file with a name that includes the characters you’ve typed. Search Companion recognizes the key words OR and AND. If you type new or recent in the All or Part of the File Name box, Rover brings back files such as new pictures.jpg and recent songs.mp3. If you type two words in the All or Part of the File Name box, Rover assumes you mean AND. The search for filenames is quite literal, and filename extensions are included if you have Windows show filename extensions. So if you show filename extensions and search for the characters txt, you see all of your .txt text files. All of the advanced search options described in the section “Digging Deeper with Advanced Searches” are available by choosing Use Advanced Search Options.

4. If you don’t find the file you want, try the option called Change File Name or Keywords. This option enables you to easily switch over to searching for text inside the documents. Searching for All Files and Folders If you aren’t absolutely, totally, utterly certain that you want to find a picture, photo, music file, video, or document, it’s best to tell Rover to fetch everything matching your criteria, and sift through the results yourself. Here’s how:

1. Choose Start -> Search.

2. Click All Files and Folders, and go for a full-fledged search. 3. Help Rover find your file. If you have filename extensions showing, and you type .doc in this box, for example, you get a list of all the .doc files. The A Word or Phrase in the File box jumps through some interesting hoops. If you type a single word, Search Companion looks for that word, of course. If you type a phrase like back in a minute, Search Companion looks for that precise phrase, with spaces and punctuation exactly the way you specify. Search Companion also looks for information attached to a file information you may not see if you open the file. It’s called metadata, and I gave you an example of a metadata search earlier when I said that Search would find Beethoven’s 9th if you looked for Ludwig. Media files usually have metadata attached to them with information about the content. Microsoft Office documents always have metadata attached to them. You can see Office metadata by bringing up the Office application (such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) and choosing File -> Properties. The file’s metadata appears on the tabs marked Summary and Custom. The Look In box lets you pick the starting point of the search. If you want to search your entire network (a process that could take many hours!), click the down-arrow and choose Browse -> My Network Places -> Entire Network.

4. Click Search and the Companion returns the names of files that match all of your criteria. (In geek terms, they’re “ANDed” together.) If you tell Rover that you want to see files with woody in all or part of the filename, with the phrase blew it again in the file, Search Companion returns only files with names that match AND contain the indicated phrase. So a file named woodrow.doc containing the phrase blew it again wouldn’t make the cut. Nor would a file called woody.txt with the text blewit agin. That’s the lowdown on simple searches. Much more power awaits, in the rest of this article. Using Wildcards Windows XP’s Search Companion lets you use wildcards, symbols that substitute for letters. The easiest way to describe a wildcard is with an example. ? is the single-letter wildcard. If you tell Rover to look for files named d?g.txt, the mutt dutifully retrieves dog.txt and dug.txt (if you have files with those names), but it doesn’t retrieve drag.txt or ding.txt. The ? matches one and only one character in the filename. Search Companion recognizes two wildcards. ? matches a single character, and * matches multiple (zero or more) characters. Wildcards work with only file and folder names. The A Word or Phrase in the File box does not recognize wildcards.

Digging Deeper with Advanced Searches The full-fledged search dialog box has three buttons: When Was It Modified?, What Size Is It?, and More Advanced Options. If you click on the (inappropriately named) When Was It Modified? button, you have a chance to specify when the file you’re looking for was last changed (in computerese, modified means changed). As you can see, though, you aren’t limited to the modified date. In fact, Search Companion searches for files based on the date that they were created or last opened (“accessed” in computer lingo) as well. If you click on the What Size Is It? button, Search Companion lets you pick the file size. In my experience, people are amazed at how big files get, so if you use this option, allow yourself lots of breathing room on the high side. Finally, the More Advanced Options selection holds six possibilities:

 -  Type of File lists all of the filename extensions that your computer recognizes, except that you don’t get to see the filename extensions; you have to make do with the hokey names. If you have Microsoft Office installed, the list of Types starting with “Microsoft” goes on forever (my list includes one called Microsoft FrontPage Dont Publish an all-time classic). If you know the filename extension that you’re looking for, this is the worst place to tell Search Companion what kind of file you want. Type the filename extension in the All or Part of the File Name box (for example, *.mpeg or *.ani).

 -  Select the Search System Folders check box, and Search Companion looks in the Windows, Documents and Settings, and Program Files folders.  

-  Select the Search Hidden Files and Folders check box, and Search Companion looks in any files or folders that are marked Hidden. Hidden files and folders aren’t really hidden. They’re just marked a certain way so that Windows Explorer won’t show them unless you tell Windows Explorer to show hidden files and folders. To hide a file or folder, choose Start -> My Documents to start Windows Explorer. Rightclick on the file or folder, and click Properties. At the bottom of the Properties dialog box, in the Attributes area, select the Hidden check box. Now your file or folder is hidden from view.

 -  The Search Subfolders box tells Search Companion that you want to look in the folder specified in the Look In box, as well as in all folders inside of the Look In folder. You almost always want to have this check box selected.  -  In spite of what you read in other articles, the Case Sensitive box has nothing to do with filenames. If you check this box, Search Companion matches the case of the text you type in the A Word or Phrase in the File box. So if you type Blue Mango in the box and check this box, Search Companion looks for Blue Mango text inside files, but passes on both blue Mango and BLUE mango.

Filenames are never case sensitive. Ever. My Documents and my documents always refer to the same folder.  

-  Search Tape Backup applies only if you are using Windows XP’s Backup feature. If you’ve managed to read to this point, you’re probably serious about searching. Good on ya, as they say Down Under. If you want the Search Companion to cut to the chase, and stop bothering you with the “helping” screens that divert you to searching for specific kinds of files, do this:

1. Choose Start -> Search and bring up Rover and the Search Companion.

2. Click Change Preferences.

3. Click Change Files and Folders Search Behavior.

4. Click Advanced Includes Options to Manually Enter Search Criteria. Recommended for Advanced Users Only.