How to search for specific file on computer?

Regardless, the search engines being discussed work in both OSes.

I had never tried either "Everything" or "UltraFileSearch" that have been mentioned in this thread so I downloaded both of them and tried them out.

"UltraFileSearch" has a nice GUI that makes it easy to input your search criteria. It seemed slower to me than the Windows Search built-in to File Explorer.

"Everything" is a very fast and powerful search tool but I would never recommend it to a novice user. My main dislike for it is that it literally searched everywhere. It defaults to searching your entire system, so in my test search for "autorun.inf" that I knew was on the O: drive, instead of "Everything" finding the 2 occurrences of the file on the O: drive, it listed about 40 occurrences of the file across all of the drives in my system. To it's credit, it found all of those occurrences in less time than it took Windows or UltraFileSearch to find only the occurrences on the O: drive. It took me awhile of reading the Help to figure out how to tell "Everything" to only search the O: drive, had to do an AND search "O:\" autorun.inf (a blank between the 2 search arguments tells it to search the O: drive AND for autorun.inf) which returned only the 2 found on the O: drive.

For myself, I still prefer the Windows search tool over these 2 alternatives, mostly because it does what I need and I don't need to learn how to do things a different way. If you want something that is very easy to use then "UltraFileSearch" might be best for you, if you want something more powerful but harder to learn then "Everything" is for you.

@ Strollin

I mentioned a third party search utility in this thread because windows search did not locate the files on the OP#s external drive. Anyway I have a few file search utilities handy and do not like windows search so keep it disabled. One of those is "Everything Search" portable but it's not my "go to" search app. If you want speed try taking SwiftSearch (portable) for a test run.

It searches MFT on NTFS formatted drives only and it locates files with lightning speed. I launch it from an Elevated shortcut. It searches folder and file names and accepts wildcards (asetrisks)

Callender said:

@ Strollin

I mentioned a third party search utility in this thread because windows search did not locate the files on the OP#s external drive. Anyway I have a few file search utilities handy and do not like windows search so keep it disabled. One of those is "Everything Search" portable but it's not my "go to" search app. If you want speed try taking SwiftSearch (portable) for a test run.

It searches MFT on NTFS formatted drives only and it locates files with lightning speed. I launch it from an Elevated shortcut. It searches folder and file names and accepts wildcards (asetrisks)

Very simplistic I like it. One for me to carry around on my thumb drive.

SwiftSearch works pretty good but not enough of an improvement over the Windows search tool that I would start using it instead.

The Windows search tool has always done everything I needed. On top of that, I probably would never remember to invoke SwiftSearch instead of the Windows search tool since I almost always have several File Explorer dialogs open when I'm working and it's very easy for me to simply type in my search in one of them rather than invoke a different program.

I'm glad we had this discussion though as it gave me a chance to try some of these other search tools and some other members have stated that they will use one of them instead of the Windows tool.