WebGyver Revisited

Finetune the Windows Search Utility

Posted by admin on April 1, 2009

Disclaimer: This is not an April Fools joke.

If you just can’t find a file that you know should exist somewhere on your Windows Server, and you’ve been reassured that you have administrator rights, take a quick look under the hood of the built-in Windows Search utility.

By default (it seems), the “Search hidden files and folders” option has been turned off in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

This is very annoying, especially when you go to the trouble of setting up all Windows directory options to show hidden & protected files (in Windows Explorer by way of Tools / Folder Options / View).

Nonetheless, there is no connection between those settings and the scope of the Search utility.

To illustrate the terrible side effects all of this can have: Recently, I made a complete fool of myself in front of Marketing and Corporate IT, because I couldn’t find another employee’s Dreamweaver cache file in that user’s profile. Then I started digging through the directory manually and eventually stumbled across the file (which, of course, was not in a documented location, since they are using the latest version of Dreamweaver CS4).

Surely, I thought, the Search utility should find it now. Wrong. Even searching through the file’s parent directory — knowing the file was there — came up empty. As tedious as it seemed at the time, I poked around with the Search utility, turned on that important setting, and suddenly the files started showing up in the search results.

And then I started writing apology e-mail messages to everyone.