Anyone know of a GOOD windows 7 search replacement?

[NEOAethyr]

Like the title says.
It's one of the last things I need in this os.

Windows 7's search sucks big time.
It's a pain in the butt to use even with custom filters.

I did a bit of reaserch and on every page I've seen mentioned a program called "everything"
.
So I check it out, uses indexing, Nononono....
Can't search inside files, ok 100% useless.

So does anyone know of a decent replacement for this thing?
I hate going to back to an almost 10year old os to do my searching...

Right now I'm in need of a decent one to find instances of regsvr32 and msmpeg2vdec.dll on 2 diff partitions (inside files).
That way I can find my list of codecs that need removing from win7 that gave me probs, the above codec is the only one I know of that I need to get rid of at the moment.

The requirements I have:
Must NOT use indexing.
Must beable to search inside file, only when I want it to.
Must not be spyware.
Must be small...
Must not be written in .net, vb is ok though.
Must beable to search hidden and system files.
Must not support symbolic links..., I have an major issue with the search engine in win7 because of this, it gets results from all my partitions multible times because it supports symbolic links.

99% the time it can't find a single instance of a file name I'm looking for when I know it exists...
That and the fact that there's no easy way of using the advanced functions.
It starts a search as I start typing into the search box lol, pretty annoying.

If there is a way to port it from xp or win2k3, I'de defently go for that.

Thanks .


Edit:
Nm...
A program called "searchmyfiles" seems to do the trick, I got it from:
http://www.nirsoft.net

The dual window interface I don't like but maybe I can do something about that.
Seems like this program is good enough though.

[NEOAethyr]

Just a small update.
The above program, SearchMyFiles doesn't have a thumbnail view.
But that isn't to big of a problem I think.

Also,del files on context menu says send to recyclebin, even if you got no recyclebin.
If you press the del key it says the same.
If you hold shift and press del it acts like windows, del's it instead of moving it to the recyclebin.

I did some checking on it and if you have no recyclebin, and you use the send to recyclebin command in this program, it del's the file, all is good.

I would reccomend this as a default SearchMyFiles.cfg file:

[General]
ShowGridLines=1
SaveFilterIndex=0
ShowInfoTip=1
FilesWildcard=*.*
SubfoldersWildcard=*.*
BaseFolder=C:\
ExcludedFolder=
ExcludeExtensions=
ScanSubfolders=1
FindFiles=1
FindFolders=0
UseFileSizeAtLeast=0
UseFileSizeAtMost=0
FileSizeAtLeast=0
FileSizeAtMost=1000
FileSizeAtLeastUnit=1
FileSizeAtMostUnit=1
FileAttrReadOnly=1
FileAttrSystem=1
FileAttrHidden=1
FileAttrArchive=1
FileAttrCompressed=1
FileAttrEncrypted=1
FileContains=0
FileContainsText=
FileContainsFlag=1
FileTimeCreated=0
FileTimeModified=0
FileTimeAccessed=0
FileTimeCreatedLastXX=1
FileTimeModifiedLastXX=1
FileTimeAccessedLastXX=1
ShowTimeInGMT=0
FileContainsCaseSensitive=0
FileContainsMultiValues=0
UseMaxNumOfFiles=0
MaxNumOfFiles=10000
SubFolderDepth=0
MaxMRU=0
DontSaveMRULists=1
OpenFileOnDoubleClick=0
MarkDuplicateFiles=1
SearchMode=1
SetFocusOnSearcnEnd=1
SetFocusOnSearcnStart=1
AddExportHeaderLine=0
MinimizeRestoreWindows=0
WinPos=2C 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 02 00 00 E0 01 00 00
Columns=68 01 00 00 06 02 01 00 78 00 02 00 6E 00 03 00 6E 00 04 00 77 00 05 00 64 00 06 00 64 00 07 00 5A 00 08 00 5A 00 09 00 5A 00 0A 00
Sort=0

Set the file to read only so it won't save your searches.
The only possible prob you may have is that you may not have a c drive, but most will.
If that is the case, set to x:\.
And that the default pos I have may not work for you, since I'm on a 1080p monitor.
If it doesn't work, del the last few lines, setup the config, exit and set the read only attrib's.

It really is a halfway decent program.
Quite fast.
Shame it's got 2 windows and no thumbnail view, so it's not a 100% complete replacement.
But definitely good enough to do some power searching .

Perhaps a res hack to it could fix the dual window thing and make it into a single window.

I am still interested if anyone has anything better.

[Nikolasz]

i got "Search Everything" for w7
But im not wery happy as

win98se having!

Im tryingto port explorer.exe from my win98se to my win7 then load as win98 compability, to make search files somehow, im mising old SIMPLE days!!!

[pcunite]

FileSearchEX has been cool for me. No matter what tool you use, what is nice is having an SSD these days. I remember way back trying to search on XP and an old IDE drive ... XP would take forever. With Windows 7 and SSD, and then my personal fav FileSearchEX, searching is so fast and easy.

[kaidomac]

Necro-bumping this thread because I finally found a good replacement - UltraFileSearch:

http://www.ultrafilesearch.com/

It doesn't use background indexing, you can search both files and folders, and you can search both local & mapped drives. It will also search inside Office docs & Adobe (you have to install the Office filter from Microsoft & just install Adobe Reader to do that). I was going NUTS trying to find a good replacement for XP's Classic search, which was still crappy but at least it worked on network shares. I tried FileSearchEx, Everything, Locate32, etc. This one searches folder-by-folder (including subfolders), so it's not as quick as Everything, which piggybacks off the NTFS indexing, but it does the job. The Lite version is free.