Hey everyone, this is Will from BeYourOwnIT.com. I’m going to do a quick video on using Windows Search. Now Windows Search back in Windows XP used to be here on the Start menu and you go up and click it and a little box will show up and you can type whatever. It has now been moved to this bar and to this bar here. That will search files that are within the directory trees so the further down you go, the more precise your search is. In this case, the files I’m using are wildcard .camrec and they all end with camrec and the star is the wildcard so it’s basically going to find anything that has a .camrec at the end.

As you can see, there’s a whole bunch. It’s not just that extension, either. You can go wildcard .doc or wildcard .docx and search will start. As you can see, it’s starting to find all the docx’s. You can also place wildcards in the middle.

You can run the search and search will turn in those. You can also do things like date: and it’s actually like the range now… You can do date: less than 11/02/2010 and it will look for everything that’s newer than 11/02/2010. Or size greater than 10KB and it will find all files greater than 10 KB.

You can use Boolean operators which are AND, OR and NOT… size greater than 10KB NOT date: less than 11/02/2010. So, it’s going to find everything whose size is greater than 10 KB and not less than date 11/02/2010.

For Windows Search, you can’t use multiple keywords in the same query so you’ll get one of these. If you use a third-party tool like Agent Ransack which…Let’s just use regular expressions, sorry. Let’s use regular expressions and if you don’t know regular expressions you probably won’t be using them.

It’s one of those things that you either know or you don’t. Basically, they are ways to craft searches or formatting. They look pretty strange to people who don’t really understand how they work.

Anyhow, if you know how to use them or if you’re willing to look up how to use them, Agent Ransack does support regular expressions.

This has been Will for BeYourOwnIT with some tips on how to search Windows and find the files you’re looking for. Remember that you can also go to Folder and Search Options and show all the hidden files to make sure your search returns a more thorough result.

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Thanks for watching.