SearchMyFiles

The built-in Windows search tool can stand improvement. Fortunately, excellent third-party tools like NirSoft's SearchMyFiles can pick up the slack. It's a free search tool that improves on the standard Windows process. It can search by file attributes, content, and size,; by the time a file was last modified, created, or accessed; or by wild-card searches. You can create extremely specific and accurate searches, such as every file created in the previous five minutes that is over 400KB. You can copy your search results to the clipboard and save them as text, html, csv, or xml files. It's completely portable, too; you can host it on a USB drive, search a computer, and remove it without leaving a trace in the Registry.

SearchMyFiles downloads as zip file but runs without installing. It opens with two dialogs: Search Options, in which you configure searches, and the main window, which displays results and contains the file menu and other basic settings. The Help file links to the developer's Web site for further information, but an extensive user's manual is included with the download. However, the program is easy enough to use as is, despite its extensive options. You simply specify a standard search or the extremely handy duplicates search, which folders to search or exclude, and other attributes. SearchMyFiles does the rest.

SearchMyFiles is freeware, and it works in all versions of Windows, from 2000 to 7. The latest version adds a Start Search command-line option for initiating searches without displaying the Search Options window.

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