I always had a difficult time finding things on my computer. I often used to remark, "Now where did I put that?" Old newsletter articles, e-mail messages from two years ago, a web page that I saved earlier this year, the letter I wrote to the local newspaper, and many more items seem to disappear amongst the thousands of items stored on my hard drive. I have been known to search and search for items only to eventually give up without ever finding them.
I have tens of thousands of e-mail messages from the past several years stored on my hard drive. Finding a specific message used to be a rather tedious task. Sometimes I never found the message I was looking for, even though I was certain it was stored someplace on my Windows system's hard drive.
It is easy to find things stored within the hundreds of millions of documents on the web. All you need to do is use any of several search engines, such as Google. I couldn't believe that it is easy to find information within hundreds of million web pages but difficult to do the same thing with a few thousand documents on my own hard drive!
In the past I have often used Microsoft's own SEARCH capability that is included with every copy of Windows as Windows Explorer. It will find files but has several major limitations. First of all, it is slow. Next, it only works with Word DOC files, ASCII text files, and a few other file formats. Windows Explorer cannot look inside PDF files or any of several other popular file formats. Finally, it searches only for single words or exact text strings; it will not find files that contain words in different parts of the file.
This week I found the solution. Now I can find any file or e-mail message on my hard drive within seconds. I can search by file name, date, size, or more. This solution can look inside e-mail messages. It can even find pictures on my hard drive. The program is lightning-fast. It is also very user-friendly. The program I am using used to cost $75.00 but is now available free of charge.
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