Tuesday, February 15, 2005

XP text search broken…

Have you ever done a search for files containing specific text with Windows Explorer and have it return no results even though you know that the files are there? Well, if you're using XP, chances are the problem is that XP only returns results for files whose extensions have a "PersistentHandler" value in the registry. It's documented in a MS tech note on the issue.

Why do you care? Because the PowerBuilder source code extract files don't have such values, unless you create them. Fortunately, one of the MS MVPs has a utility that restores the typical "search all files" results one gets from the earlier operating systems.

3 comments:

Roy Kiesler [TeamSybase] said...

I use X1 for all my searching needs -- these days, XP's own search is a distant memory :-)

Dick Delete said...

Cheers, adding PersistentHandler values for other extensions works great but .....

Still there's something VERY ANNOYING about the XP Search function.

A search for the word "scripts", will find all the files where this word is in, however, a search for "script" does not. WHY????

Do you have any idea/fix?
Thanks in advance
Dick.

bruce.armstrong said...

That's because XP does a whole word search (with some variations) unless you use wildcards:

http://www.aimingtech.com/file_searching.htm

Here's some other timps I came across for making it work faster as well.

http://www.xpsearch.info/xps2.htm