Problems Searching For Folders and Files

Hi, I've just built a computer for my father's home business, and installed Win7. On this computer, there are stored customer folders containing invoices, proposals etc. Previously, we were running a computer on Vista and had no problem simply typing in the first few letters of a customer's name in the main search on the desktop or a search within a folder and the folder would pop right up in the search, but now in Win7, it's not working out that way. I've googled around and read that it's a problem with Win7 and indexing or something, but I wanted to come here and ask if there is a way to fix this where it will work. Perhaps, I should mentioned that the files are stored on a separate partition from the main system.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks Shawn for your very quick response. I'll give this a try first thing in the morning.

Ok, I read the tutorial and did as it said. I indexed the folders containing the files which I would want searched, but for some reason it's still not working. When I do a search for a customer's name, both from the Start Menu and from within the folder itself, it returns no results. It's probably something very simple that I'm overlooking but I can't seem to figure it out

Yea, I rebuilt it the first time and just tried it again, and still nothing

Ok, I did it. Now, I'm able to find files when I do a search within the folder that contains the files, but from the Start Menu I'm not able to find those files. Maybe this is because the files I'm searching for are on a different partition?

If you need to search ONLY for file names and folders, take a look at Everything, a very fast search tool from Voidtools.com.

It's easily configured. Search all drives or just one drive. It re-indexes the database every time it starts.

Results are near-instantaneous. Just type your search term into the single box.

The only drawback is that it does NOT search file contents. So if you put your spaghetti sauce recipes in a file called "How To Repair Putty Knives", it won't help you at all.