Windows XP Search Sucks
by Marshall on June 29, 2004
I hate Windows XP’s default search panel. It takes like three clicks to do a simple file name search. There is a registry tweak to “restore” the old search panel. Of course if you don’t like to use the registry you can do it from Tweak UI as well.
TweakUI Instructions
Regedit.exe Instructions
Bye Bye Search Dog!
7 comments
Suck is exactly what it does, hard. MS followed the principle, “If it ain’t broke, fix it ’til it is” when they added that stupid dog and different tiers to the search. They should have taken a lesson from Clippy. Thank you for linking to the registry fix. My mileage varied with TweakUI with 98SE so I’m not keen on using it with XP.
by Anonymous on July 10, 2004 at 1:26 pm. #
Total Sucks. The content search is faster because it skips files….thus rendering the option useless. You have to change the registry for each file type to get it to work. I hope Microsoft rolled some heads over that decision. I was so fed up I spent a week writing my own search util which I now use at work….as do my co-workers.
by Scott on July 21, 2004 at 6:00 pm. #
Tweakui did not work. I’ve been thinking of migrating to Linux. The new new new puke of everything is killing me.
by gale on October 11, 2010 at 8:58 pm. #
Actually, XP search funtion was fast and easy if you set the search to advanced options (1 click). Windows 7 search is horrid. Can’t open explorer and right click on a folder and select search. It assumes that indexing is the way to go due to large drives etc…. I search extensively on my local drives as well as network drives. I have NEVER found indexing faster…. It suck CPU and takes forever to find files and assumes that you only want to search thru specific extentions… to get indexing to work you need to configure it. That won’t speed up searches either.
by search man on November 9, 2010 at 12:46 am. #
Windows XP SEARCH ..one of the stupid tools I have ever seen in my life. I dowl loaded windows grep software from some unknown and it works like magic. some times I wonder do they really think when they right software . I wasted two days trying to find a text in about 100 .xml files.
by Srikant on February 11, 2011 at 12:56 pm. #
I tried to search for a word that I know must occur a million times in my code. The search immediately returns nothing. IT DIDN’T EVEN MAKE AN EFFORT! At least, AT LEAST, it needs to tell me that it is not looking inside the content of these files because these file extensions are not indexed or whatever. But NO, it rather I think I make a mistake.
It takes a mediocre programmer 30 minutes to write a program that can search for text inside text files. But Microsoft decides to spend its billions doing other dumb things. And don’t get me started on the little annoyances like new-line handling in Notepad.
by Kenny on May 12, 2011 at 6:42 pm. #
I loved XP search personally … in fact it was a big shock going to Windows 7 because it was not there! I use FileSearchEX now to give me all that XP search love. That said I try to keep files in sane folders to help me not forget where they are.
by TommyW on January 24, 2012 at 11:20 pm. #