How to find a file in Windows

Do you need quickly find a file in your computer? I do it often and there are better tools than what you can find built in in Windows. I use tool Everything from David Carpenter. It is very fast and your computer doesn’t spend too much time and resources on indexing your files.

This method will work only if you well organized your data on your disc. It means that your folder must have good structure and good names. The same is with names of files. For example all photos I have in directory Photo. This directory has subfolders by year and these have subfolders with different events. For example I have folder called 1810 Alps. When I search folder from Alps, I just write alps. If there are more Alps folders, I can search for photos from year by adding path:2018 or search only in photos by adding path:photo.

When I saved photo from an application and I forgot in which folder it was saved I just typed jpg and sorted results by date.

I’m storing manuals to different devices on network drive in folder Manuals. When I need manual to my mobile phone I just write mobi path:manu. Because I used already a lot of different mobile phones I have to sort results by date or I might be more specific like mobi sams for Smasung mobile phone. But of course it requires that the name of the manual files have good names for example Mobile phone Samsung Note 9.pdf.

As I mentioned above, application allows indexing folders even on network drives. My tip for really quick search is to start application with unusual keyboard shortcut so it starts quickly and it doesn’t collide with other applications. I prefer AltGr + I.

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