Find Files Fast
Lots of programs promise to locate your data in a hurry. Our tests reveal the top tools for searching your hard drive and inbox.
Dennis O'Reilly
With HP wireless printers, you could have printed this from any room in the house. Live wirelessly. Print wirelessly.
You know the file is somewhere. Windows can locate it in a twinkling, no doubt. You click Start, Search, type a word or two, click Search, and wait.
And wait.
A banana and half a sports section later, you get the news: 'Search is complete. There are no results to display. But that can't be! Since you know the file arrived as an e-mail attachment, you open Outlook, click Find, type your term, click Find Now, and see 'No items found'. Oops! Outlook can't search attachments.
I know your frustration. My boss recently gave me a simple task: to find the original version of a Scott Spanbauer Internet Tips column about wireless network security from a few years ago. That's all he remembered about it--no file name, no date, nothing.
The search functions built into Windows and Outlook came up empty. (The next Outlook, expected in 2005, and the next Windows, code-named Longhorn and due in 2006, will ostensibly offer superior search functions.) As I scanned through row upon row of file names in Explorer, I knew there had to be a better way. Then in a vision of folder paths and mystery extensions, I saw my quest: to discover the best finder of lost data files.
I chose ten file-search utilities, known and not so well known, and tried using each to unearth that lost Spanbauer file in either or both of two locations: as an attachment among my 30MB of Outlook data (comprising 1104 files) and as a .doc file in my 750MB data megafolder, which held 1110 assorted files and 43 subfolders. I limited the e-mail tests to Microsoft Outlook because it is the most widely used Windows e-mail program.
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