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Step 1. Disable all Windows search.

Step 2. Install "Agent Ransack". Stupid name. Awesome program. http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/.

Step 3. Pick your jaw up from the flaw once you realise how fucking fast a search program on Windows can run. Also enjoy "normal" and consistent search behavior, search by name, content, date and type using a sane and consistent interface. The Windows search "tag" system is painful and I always used to forget them, making the search feature useless.

Step 4. Turn on the shell integration that brings up Agent Ransack when you press F3.

Step 5. Lament the way the old Windows search still pops up when you are in a "library" or on the desktop. :(

http://hardforum.com/showthrea...

Lots of good tips for chopping out the crap.

One of the many good tips is: disabling the "Windows Search Indexing" service, I've always done that whatever the version of windows, (it started with Win95 and it's 100% CPU usage) using Agent Ransack instead https://www.mythicsoft.com/age... (it's only fault is no cache).

A better free search for Windows (in many use cases at least). Agent Ransack More like XP version (but better and significantly faster). They also have an improved money required version, File Locator pro -- never tried this. I was inspired to look around for something better after MS broke its existing feeble search tool.

When Microsoft hosed their search utility in Windows 7, it was programs like Agent Ransack that came to the rescue for people such as me who HATE the Microsoft Indexing Service and horrid search engine in Windows 7.

Citing this as an example, I am willing to bet that other tools, perhaps the revival of Windows/Total Commander level tools will emerge post Windows 8 that will assist us "geezers" to maintain a similar level of keyboard shortcuts without Point-Click to achieve the same objective.

Remember, Microsoft doesn't listen to the people who service or administrate said systems, they listen to the masses who bring them the most money, the consumer.

Get Agent Ransack http://mythicsoft.com/agentransack

And agent ransack gives you back a decent file search tool: Agent Ransack

Classic start menu: ClassicShell

Check out Agent Ransack - it's a much better search program.

If you can't get away with installing Cygwin at work, try GNU utilities for Win32

Just unzip them into the path and off you go.

also, that problem with search for text in file is a BUG

If you want a working version of their GUI search, try Agent Ransack

I have a program, but it will not completely run on my system. it will give an error when I try to perform certain functions. I contacted the author about it, and he said the error was caused by my date / time format being non-standard, and that I could change the format in the control panel. the program in question is Agent Ransack, by MythicSoft I have never met another program that throws errors about this, and I have several programs that actually use the time stamp format I specify in the control panel, if anyone is wondering, it's yyyy.mmdd HHnn.ss

There's a useful product called Agent Ransack that I use all the time to search through source code either for variable/member references or for common coding errors (e.g. '=' instead of '=='). http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack. Also supports regular expressions.

Dictionary:
http://wordweb.info/

Search to replace Windows crippled search, though Desktop search may be better:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

New to me, but have been wanting since before XP:
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardli nkshellext.html Video editing:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
Notepad replacement:
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

And of course Firefox and OpenOffice, but those are available for other systems, oh and VideoLan Client (VLC)
For programming: (also available for Linux)
http://www.freebasic.net/

You also may want to check out my learning japanese apps post:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182351&cid =15073257

1. Windows XP is incredibly buggy (as in bugs that won't crash the system, but are usability nuisances)
Turn on focus follows mouse, and clicking on a window in a grouped taskbar is pot luck.

Speaking of the grouped taskbar, if you close a window, and then click on the taskbar group right quick again, the list is almost always corrupted.

The network stack that they are holding off until Vista is needed "yesterday" in Windows.
Indexing service is worse than useless, and if you don't have it installed, you still see cruft from it.

Ditto for disk search. If it wasn't for Agent Ransack, I'd be looking long and hard at switching to Linux. For me, Agent Ransack is the epitome of the search experience (even counting Gogle Web Search). Their pro version may even be a step down in some areas.

2. I don't like the paradigm of the "Desktop search". What? You mean if I like some plugins for Google and some plugins for Microsoft, I'm going to have to use two separate databases? Also, what happens when I move a file from one drive to another?

3. They yanked the feature of truly customized folders in 98 from Windows XP. What? You mean I get to pay for less features? How about removing ones I don't want, like the broken search and indexing...Even the 98 search was more functional!
That being said, why do I stay on Windows?

I understand environment variables, have DOS apps I still use, get along nice with CMD.EXE, NTFS compression, which I still don't understand why it isn't on by default. I don't really use the home directory feature (Documents and Settings), and I understand it's even worse on Linux. I have a better understanding of Windows programming than Linux programming, and I'm looking towards swapping pieces out with Wine and ReactOS based components.

"What was wrong with 2000's search is the same thing that is currently wrong with XP's search: it sucks. It's slow and inaccurate."

Try Agent Ransack. It supports regular expressions and lists matching lines (like a graphical grep) and I've been using it frequently for the last 2 years or so...

And I still don't feel confident that it is giving me the correct results...

Me neither. There have been many times where I know for a fact that a certain string is present in a file but search doesn't find it. And yes, I have removed all the crap so it looks like the W2K version. And I hate the way it looks inside ZIP files. For a good free search program I recommend Agent Ransack: http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.

Windows XP cos the fucking thing's broken. I'm a java developer and it won't search .java files for text, even with the updates. Useless. I use Agent Ransack instead.

Next!

Justin.

Agent ransack isn't bad though; it doesn't index your files like those desktop search tools, but it does replace windows search adding regexps and speed.

Agent Ransack. An amazing search util, and Ditto CP a good clipboard manager.

Agent Ransack is a free program that spanks the XP search tool, and has the functionality you want. I don't use windows anymore, but when I did, this is what I used. It also has the ability to integrate into the shell a little so it's conveniently accessible, e.g. from the "Search" start menu item.

I think that may be what you desire for a Windows search tool.

-Jay

I personaly don't "get" the plethora of "desktop search software" currently proliferating around the globe. Purveyors of said software would have you believe it's the next killer thing, but personally, anybody who doesn't know - roughly - where they've saved something on their hard drive, probably doesn't deserve to find it anyway.

I would much rather see a Windows search that actually doesn't ignore filenames - such as .asp - in a search simply because Microsoft can not comprehend anybody ever wanting to search for them. I have had to install Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/) simply to do a "grep" on my ASP files. This sucks, Microsoft!

I amended his question in my mind to mean "on windows" because I believe that is where OSS is needed most in order to transition society from where it stands now to OSS.
When I click on the volume system tray icon it takes forever to open.
I forgot to put it in the list above but a replacement for explorer.exe that is functionally exactly the same but split into separate executables. My notion is that OSS should do a similar embrace and extend approach to Microsoft Windows that Microsoft did in several areas, the end result being that there will eventually be a Windows skeleton that will be easily replaced once and for all with an OSS component.
BTW everybody using Windows XP should download http://taskswitchxp.sourceforge.net/
Does anyone know of other OSS Windows component replacers?
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/default.asp x is far and away a better desktop search utility than the one that has been bundled with Windows. Problem is, it's not open source.

For searching within files on Windows I'm a fan of the free Agent Ransack.