Windows 7: Searching for 'matching' files. is there a better way?

Hi, while i do like my jump from XP to Windows 7 in the most part, i'm just plan confused when it comes to 'searching' for files..

eg XP's search would allow me quite easily to list , and subsequently copy/move/delete all files created before/after a certain date , larger than nnn MB's in size etc regardless if it was a local , or mapped network drive.



Obviously a lot of this is possbile through the use of DOS commands and commandline tools such as robocopy /MAXAGE , i'd just like to be able to do same from GUI, or a good 3rd party GUI based file manager utility that will do such things. UltraFileSearch gives me some of this info, but doesnt seem to allow for the COPY/MOVE/DELETE, of files that it matched on. It also seems to struggle with finding files that are greater than 4gb.

Can someone exlain how i can do thesde sort of tasks, natively, or a good 3rd party app. ?

Regards

WIndows 7 should do all that natively. What exactly are you looking for?

Windows 7 has a much better search function. Open up an explorer window and look at the top right corner - the search box. Start typing in the window and you'll see search filters.

Is that what you are looking for?

I understand the OP frustration with win 7 searching. I just tried 4 searches. I index the entire drive.Try doing a search for files > 4 gigs (there are 2 on my HD) no results. Try searching for a file name with a missing character and use a wild card, it misses. (ie rockers***m, or rockers???m)

Could the searches be more specific, sure. It just feels like it could be better

Ken J

How did you search with the size filter? Did you use "size: >4000000000"? I tried that on my computer and it found all of the files I had that were greater than 4000000000 bytes.

The * wildcard will search for any number of characters between letters. For instance, if I search for h*me, it will find home, hooooooome, h._folder_me, etc. The ? wildcard will only search for words that have one character missing, ie: h?me will find home.

Sorry.. i must have been blind... never noticed those options under that Search box.

size:>4GB is the search you want, computers dont know what "4 gigs" means.
I'm currently downloading a bunch of Ubuntu 9.10 CDs, each over 600 MB.
Start > "size:>600MB" found each on. (even in a non-indexed location!)

Indexing the entire drive or drives is not a good idea.

Why not? I don't index my entire system partition, but I do index my entire data partition.

If the data drive only contains documents and other user data like that, then sure. But indexing the whole system drive includes a lot of junk files. And files that change over and over again, adds more work to the indexer.

Like many people I keep a system (boot) partition and a separate data partition. I have set the OS to index the whole data partition