Computer Tips for ‘Regular’ People - How to Find Stuff on Your Hard Drive

2008 July 8

by Urbain

Do you ever have trouble finding a document or image that you stored on your computer a week, month or year or so ago?

If you’re using a Microsoft operating system (like Windows XP, Windows 2000, for instance), there’s an easy solution.

Look on the bottom left on your screen and your should see a button that reads “START.” Click it.
A menu will appear when you click the START button. Within it, you should see a button that reads “SEARCH.” There’s an icon of a magnifying glass next to it.
After you click SEARCH, you’ll see some options, such as:
And so forth. Click For Files or Folders.

A screen will open up with different options. It looks sort of like this:

Search Menu

If you know for sure that it was a word processing document that you stored, click that option. If you’re not sure exactly how your formatted your document, click the All files and folders option to be on the safe side. (See the image above.)

Next, you have an option to search the file name and/or the content of the file for a particular search term.

Searching for Documents (like spreadsheets, web pages with text in them, or word processing documents). Many people use Microsoft Office’s default file names, so if it is a document that you are seeking, it is probably best to search the content of the file, like we’ll do below. You can search both the file name and content if you want.
Searching for Images (such as .gif, .jpg and so on). If you are looking for an image, you’ll want to select the search file name option because search does not read words within an image. It’s impossible to search within an image file and because of that, a lot of PDF files also cannot be searched because they are based on images.

In the example below, we’ll search for “dog” within the document.

You’ll see that there are a couple of options that you can use for your search. My computer is networked and has portable drives attached to it, as shown in the example below. If you have one PC that you’re using, your documents will generally be stored by default in “My Documents” or on Drive C, which is your hard drive.

Searching example using 'dog' and location

For purposes of this example, we’ll select my secondary hard drive, which is Drive F.

There are some other options that you can use to narrow down your search:

When Was it Modified - This option is very helpful, especially if you know the time frame in which you created the document. Just follow the prompts.
What Size Is It - I generally don’t bother with this. Most non-technical people who are looking for PC tips aren’t gong to remember the size of their documents, either!
Advanced Options can be very useful. If you know the type of document, such as Adobe PDF or .doc (for Microsoft Word), a drop menu will allow you to limit your search to PDF or .doc documents. In the example below, I’m searching for all types of files, which might be what you want to do if you’re not all that familiar with how your software works. If you’re a beginner, it might also be a good idea to select the all subfolders option as shown below. You probably don’t need to search for the system files or hidden files. That’s something you do if you’re trying to fix a glitch in your registry, remove a virus, or look for specific software files.

Searching Subfolders

Once you’ve selected all your options, simply click the “SEARCH” button and the search commences. If you have a lot of data stored on your computer, it might take awhile.
Search in Progress...

Once the search is complete, you’ll see all of your results. In this example, here are the documents with the word “dog” in them:

what search results look like

Click on any of the results to bring up the document. You might have to click a few of them if a lot of results appear and you’re not sure which one is appropriate.

In a future post, we’ll explore how to store and organize your electronic documents so that you can find them quickly without having to use the search option.