CHAPTER 16Searching for Files and Messages on Your Computer
Hard disk storage in the 21st century is reliable, fast, and cheap. Just about every computer sold in the past few years has lots of it. The result is that people now store many thousands of files on their computers. To organize their folders, people use lots of folders and subfolders. Although having lots of well-organized files on your hard disk is certainly good, it has a couple of downsides. For one, drilling down through a ton of folders to get to a file gets tedious. For another, you can easily forget where you put a file and what you named it.
In earlier versions of Windows, you could use shortcuts and searches to help with these problems, but too many shortcuts just added clutter to the screen. The old style of searching is slow and tedious. Searching in Windows 10 is more like searching on the Internet. You don't have to search for filenames; you can search by content and meaning. And in most cases, the search results are instantaneous. You don't have to wait for the system to slog through the whole file system looking at every file.
Basics of Searching
Like filing cabinets, computers store information. The information in your filing cabinet has no “meaning” to your filing cabinet. Likewise, the information in your computer has no meaning to the ...
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