I have Vista w/SP1 installed on two machines and have seen this "file
search is completely broken" problem on each. This is so incredibly
weird and stupid, and I'm very ****ed that Vista won't even produce
results for a simple file search.

So, I'm in Vista and the little search box at top right is present on
any directory I browse of course. I'm trying to find a file that's in
a directory, a directory that has lots of files in it - 977 items to
be exact, files and folders, but there's not many files in contained
folders, most are in the top level of this directory.

So, I have one group of files THAT I'M STARING AT that have
"WindowsVistaBusiness" in the name - these files were receipts for my
purchase of Vista actually (bought retail version, installed on
existing machine w/XP and this drive and directory being searched was
already being used on the prior machine and has files going way back,
probably to Win2K or earlier).

ALL OF THE BELOW COMES OUT THE SAME WHETHER OR NOT I CHECK "Include
non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)" in Advanced
Search as well:

I search for "Windows" and this group of files with
"WindowsVistaBusiness" in the name comes up in the list, as expected.

I search for "Vista" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "Business" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "iness" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "indow" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "wind" and the group of files comes up.

I search for "dow" and it says "no items match your search."

I actually like Vista in a lot of ways even though MS has screwed over
half the software I own, most of this software PRODUCED BY THEM AROUND
2003 AND IT DOESN'T WORK ON VISTA AND I'M FORCED TO BUY NEW VERSIONS!
Even with that though, I'm trying to stick with it, but this is
****ing me off that something simple like this doesn't work. I just
did a net search and found other people experiencing same thing with
NO RESOLUTION!!!! I'm adding this post to add my experience to the
lot...

What the hell is this problem???!! How could MS not fix this at least
by SP1??? This is unbelievable.

Do you have 'find partial matches' selected?

I find that the Vista search is not reliable/consistent and use 'Agent
Ransack', a free download search program, when I don't get results I expect
from the Vista search.

Michael

"no_nick" wrote in message
...
I have Vista w/SP1 installed on two machines and have seen this "file
search is completely broken" problem on each. This is so incredibly
weird and stupid, and I'm very ****ed that Vista won't even produce
results for a simple file search.

So, I'm in Vista and the little search box at top right is present on
any directory I browse of course. I'm trying to find a file that's in
a directory, a directory that has lots of files in it - 977 items to
be exact, files and folders, but there's not many files in contained
folders, most are in the top level of this directory.

So, I have one group of files THAT I'M STARING AT that have
"WindowsVistaBusiness" in the name - these files were receipts for my
purchase of Vista actually (bought retail version, installed on
existing machine w/XP and this drive and directory being searched was
already being used on the prior machine and has files going way back,
probably to Win2K or earlier).

ALL OF THE BELOW COMES OUT THE SAME WHETHER OR NOT I CHECK "Include
non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)" in Advanced
Search as well:

I search for "Windows" and this group of files with
"WindowsVistaBusiness" in the name comes up in the list, as expected.

I search for "Vista" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "Business" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "iness" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "indow" and it says "no items match your search."

I search for "wind" and the group of files comes up.

I search for "dow" and it says "no items match your search."

I actually like Vista in a lot of ways even though MS has screwed over
half the software I own, most of this software PRODUCED BY THEM AROUND
2003 AND IT DOESN'T WORK ON VISTA AND I'M FORCED TO BUY NEW VERSIONS!
Even with that though, I'm trying to stick with it, but this is
****ing me off that something simple like this doesn't work. I just
did a net search and found other people experiencing same thing with
NO RESOLUTION!!!! I'm adding this post to add my experience to the
lot...

What the hell is this problem???!! How could MS not fix this at least
by SP1??? This is unbelievable.

On Aug 20, 9:35*am, "Michael Walraven"
wrote:
Do you have 'find partial matches' selected?


Note that I said the file names "CONTAIN" "WindowsVistaBusiness" -
that was partly to say NONE of these file names BEGIN with
"WindowsVistaBusiness." So when the find succeeds w/"wind" it's
already doing a partial match. None of the file names begin with
"Wind."

But for more on your point: the search tab in folder options has
these options enabled: "Always search file names only", "Include
subfolders", and "Find Partial Matches." Also tried this with and
without the "Don't use the index when searching the file system (might
be slow)" and it was the same results either way. Right now I have
that enabled (don't use index).

Searching in Vista is generally based on words and the system has no way of
knowing that "Windowsvistabusiness" can be split into separate words. The
search text you type in is matched to the start of words only by default, so
that's why "Windows", "Wind", "Windowsvis" etc. will produce results but
"vista", "indows" etc. won't.

You can search for "*vista" to find the text "vista" at any position in the
filename {or content}. Or if the files were named something like
Windows_Vista_Business this would work directly.

Dave Wood



"no_nick" wrote in message
...
On Aug 20, 9:35 am, "Michael Walraven"
wrote:
Do you have 'find partial matches' selected?


Note that I said the file names "CONTAIN" "WindowsVistaBusiness" -
that was partly to say NONE of these file names BEGIN with
"WindowsVistaBusiness." So when the find succeeds w/"wind" it's
already doing a partial match. None of the file names begin with
"Wind."

But for more on your point: the search tab in folder options has
these options enabled: "Always search file names only", "Include
subfolders", and "Find Partial Matches." Also tried this with and
without the "Don't use the index when searching the file system (might
be slow)" and it was the same results either way. Right now I have
that enabled (don't use index).

On Aug 20, 2:32*pm, "Dave Wood [MSFT]"
wrote:
Searching in Vista is generally based on words and the system has no way of
knowing that "Windowsvistabusiness" can be split into separate words. The
search text you type in is matched to the start of words only by default, so
that's why "Windows", "Wind", "Windowsvis" etc. will produce results but
"vista", *"indows" etc. won't.

You can search for "*vista" to find the text "vista" at any position in the
filename {or content}. Or if the files were named something like
Windows_Vista_Business this would work directly.

Dave Wood


Thanks! This does work now. OK, you are correct, Vista works fine
with this. It surprises me greatly that MS wants ordinary users
typing asterisks for this simple operation all of a sudden, when they
never have before, but I have no problem with that myself, having some
unix experience and command line familiarity etc. I think it's going
to be hard to get ordinary users to start adding asterisks for this
though - seems like an odd decision for MS, but as far as I'm
concerned, no problem!

Vista file finding works great! I take back my initial post
completely...

Well I would imagine the number of times someone would be searching for
something in the middle of a word would be fairly small. Typically I would
expect users would be searching for keywords in documents or in titles or
e-mails etc., where the query and the text would be whole words, and the
search system is optimized for that. We add an implicit * on the end of
queries so you only have to type the first few letters of a word to get
results {controllable via the "Partial Matches" option}. It's true that file
names where there is no punctuation between words is a case where this can
lead to unexpected results.

One of my colleagues has lots more information on this he
http://blogs.msdn.com/jonasbar/archi...ows-vista.aspx



"no_nick" wrote in message
...
On Aug 20, 2:32 pm, "Dave Wood [MSFT]"
wrote:
Searching in Vista is generally based on words and the system has no way
of
knowing that "Windowsvistabusiness" can be split into separate words. The
search text you type in is matched to the start of words only by default,
so
that's why "Windows", "Wind", "Windowsvis" etc. will produce results but
"vista", "indows" etc. won't.

You can search for "*vista" to find the text "vista" at any position in
the
filename {or content}. Or if the files were named something like
Windows_Vista_Business this would work directly.

Dave Wood


Thanks! This does work now. OK, you are correct, Vista works fine
with this. It surprises me greatly that MS wants ordinary users
typing asterisks for this simple operation all of a sudden, when they
never have before, but I have no problem with that myself, having some
unix experience and command line familiarity etc. I think it's going
to be hard to get ordinary users to start adding asterisks for this
though - seems like an odd decision for MS, but as far as I'm
concerned, no problem!

Vista file finding works great! I take back my initial post
completely...

I have exact same problem, I've spent hours trying to figure out MS's new
"features", but I haven' got a single hit yet. I even installed a couple of
"Explorer Replacements", but it turns out they are just shells for MS's junk,
so of course they won't work either. I've been seeing a lot of MS
techno-gibberish in the forums. That just adds insult to injury, because XP
worked great for people who were not IT pros.

All I need is simple XP search functionality. Any ideas?

"Fyn" wrote in message
news

I have exact same problem, I've spent hours trying to figure out MS's new
"features", but I haven' got a single hit yet. I even installed a couple
of
"Explorer Replacements", but it turns out they are just shells for MS's
junk,
so of course they won't work either. I've been seeing a lot of MS
techno-gibberish in the forums. That just adds insult to injury, because
XP
worked great for people who were not IT pros.

All I need is simple XP search functionality. Any ideas?


So what's wrong with the search field in the Start menu? (As you failed to
quote the post you replied to, and I'm not going to trawl through all my
read posts to find out...)

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:59:27 +0100, "Gordon"
wrote:

All I need is simple XP search functionality. Any ideas?


So what's wrong with the search field in the Start menu? (As you failed to
quote the post you replied to, and I'm not going to trawl through all my
read posts to find out...)

Vista search J U S T P L A I N S U C K S, Gordon. I tried it
several times after taking my XP machine to Vista and got totally
frustrated with it.

I abandoned it and use Agent Ransack for all my searches.

"Fyn" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news

I have exact same problem, I've spent hours trying to figure out MS's new
"features", but I haven' got a single hit yet. I even installed a couple
of
"Explorer Replacements", but it turns out they are just shells for MS's
junk,
so of course they won't work either.

Hmm, which ones did you test? At least these five are certainly not "just
shells for MS's junk":
http://lifehacker.com/399155/five-be...-file-managers

Don