Finding Files On Your Hard Drive

In the twenty-seven years I’ve been using computers, storage capacity has increased tremendously. My first disk-based computer (a TRS-80 from Radio Shack) stored programs and files on single-sided disks that could hold 180K (about 180,000 characters) of data at a time. With these disks it was easy to find the file I was looking for. The disks couldn’t hold many files anyway, so all I had to do was scan the directory listings for each disk until I found what I wanted.

One of my most recent computers (a Compaq Presario from Hewlett-Packard) came with a 160-gigabyte hard drive. At a capacity of approximately 160,000,000,000 characters, this drive is over eight hundred thousand times larger than the drive in my first computer. The advantage of so much capacity is that you can store thousands and thousands of files for immediate access. The downside is that after you have stored thousands and thousands of files it becomes difficult to keep track of them all.

So how do you find a certain photograph from your vacation in 2005? Or how about the MP3 file you know you downloaded six months ago but never got a chance to load into your IPod? Fortunately, if you remember even a little information about those files (like the rough dates when the photographs were taken, or that the MP3 file was one of Shakira’s recent releases), Windows can find them for you. Here’s how to search using Windows XP. (If you’re using Windows Vista, the instructions are slightly different and you might want to take a look at Microsoft’s help page about searching.)

Click on the Windows XP Start menu and select the “Search” option. On my computer the “Search” option is in the right-hand column of the Start menu, next to a magnifying glass icon. Or here’s a shortcut for computers with enhanced Windows keyboards (like my favorite, the Microsoft Wireless Comfort Keyboard): hold down the “Start” button and press the “F” key. (The “Start” button is usually two keys to the left of the spacebar and has the Windows logo printed on the key.)

Either way, you’ll see a window with the title “Search Results” and the question “What do you want to search for?” in the left-hand column. The picture below shows what this window looks like under my copy of Windows XP:

Your next choice depends on the type of file you’re searching for. Obviously, if you’re looking for a photograph, music, or video file, choose the first option. If you’re looking for documents — the kind of file you would create with Microsoft Word or a spreadsheet program — choose the second option. And if the file you’re looking for doesn’t fall into either of those categories, or if you’re not sure what category it falls into, use the third option.

The first option is pretty much self-explanatory. Click on “Pictures, music, or video”, fill out the form that appears in the left panel of the search window, and click on the “Search” button. First Windows will search the most common “digital media” folders on your hard drive (in other words, the folders where photographs, music, and video are usually stored), and then it will search the rest of the drive. Any results, such as filenames or thumbnail photographs, will display in the panel on the right. As an example, my picture search for chihuahua puppy returned the results below and I was able to select the photograph I was looking for. If your first search results are unsatisfactory, you can further refine the search using the other options in the left panel. Once you find the file you want, right-click on it, double-click it, drag it — do whatever you would normally do with the file in Windows Explorer.

Searching for documents is also straightforward but the search window offers slightly different options that allow you to search by date as well as by filename. The search becomes more useful if you click on “Use advanced search options” at the bottom of the left panel because the advance options let you search by date, filename, a word or phrase inside the document, or file size.

The most comprehensive search is “All files and folders”, because it doesn’t limit itself to any specific type of media. This means you can search for any file, no matter what kind of file it is.

There are a few important considerations to keep in mind while searching your hard drive:

• Searching can be as broad or precise as you need it to be. If you want to find one of your digital camera images, but all you can remember about it is that its filename started with “M”, ask Windows to search for a picture with M in the filename. If you need to find a letter you wrote and you can’t remember the filename, but you can remember that you used the phrase “eminent domain” in the letter, ask Windows to do a documents search, select the advanced options, and type eminent domain in the “A word or phrase in the document” box.
• If all else fails, use the “All files and folders” search and type in anything you can remember about the file to narrow down the results.
• You can type more than one fragment of a filename in the “All or part of the file name” box. For example, if you remember that the filename starts with an “F”, has the word “small” in it, and has an extension of “GIF”, type f small .gif in the filename box (put a space between each fragment and a period in front of the “gif” file extension) and click the “Search” button.

If you are using a version of Windows prior to Windows XP (such as Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, or Windows NT), your search window will look different but will be the rough equivalent of the “All files and folders” search described above. Earlier versions of Windows still have powerful search features, but they aren’t as automatic as Windows XP’s. For example, instead of asking an earlier version of Windows to search for pictures, music, video, or documents, ask it to search by filename or file extension. Again, type in as much as you can remember about the file’s name, text it might contain, its date and size, and what type of file it is (text file, image, Microsoft Word document, etc.). Then select the location to search (which can be the entire hard drive) and click on the “Find Now” button. For a more detailed tutorial on searching for files using earlier versions of Windows, see “How to Locate Files in Windows NT/95/98″ at the website of the California State University at Northridge.

Remember, computers should help you work smarter, not harder. The next time you misplace a digital file, don’t waste your time searching; let Windows Search find it for you.

Filed Under Windows How-To's