Chapter 30. Searching for Files and Messages on Your Computer
Hard disk storage in the twenty-first 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. Though it's certainly good to have lots of well-organized files on your hard disk, it has a couple of downsides. For one, drilling down through a ton of folders to get to a specific file gets tedious. For another, it's easy to forget where you put things and what you named them.
In earlier versions of Windows, you could use shortcuts and searches to help with these problems, but too many shortcuts just add that much more clutter to the screen. The old style of searching for things is slow and tedious. Searching for things in Windows 7 is a lot like searching for things on the Internet. You don't have to search for specific filenames. You can search for things 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 just store information. The information in your filing cabinet has no "meaning" to your filing cabinet. ...
Get Windows® 7 Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
