Despite the releases of Vista and Windows 7, there is still a huge number of Windows XP users. This article aims to make the use of XP just a little bit less frustrating.

Anyone who has created any kind of document on their Windows XP PC, whether it was a simple text file, program source code, a web page, or a Word document, has probably misplaced them at some time. You create the file, save it and then a few weeks later, you can't find it again. It's gone from the Most Recently Used list in whatever program you used to create it, and you can't remember the name of the folder where you saved it.

One way of finding files is to use the Windows Search utility. You can find this by clicking Start and then Search, or by clicking the Search button in Windows Explorer.

XP tries to help you by asking what you want to search for, so you might select "Documents (word processing, spreadsheet etc.)" or "All files and folders". If you choose "All files and folders" you will be asked for all or part of the filename, and a word or phrase within the file.

For example, a programmer who wrote some program code might know that the file was called "main.pas" and contains the words "unit main;". So these are entered into the search criteria, and the Search button is clicked.

Eventually the search finishes and to your horror, the results say "Search is complete. There are no results to display".
The file was not found. You know it should be there somewhere. What's happened to it?
Panic sets in. You really need that file. It MUST be there. You end up using Explorer to look in every folder on your hard disk. You didn't realise there were so many folders and it takes forever.

Stop! Don't panic.
You might have been caught out by a feature that was introduced in XP.

The Search feature in XP differs from those of its predecessors (Windows 2000 for example). They decided to try to make searches quicker and less confusing by ignoring certain types of file. Well in fact, rather than ignoring selected files, they made it search only registered file types. So if the file that you are searching for is not one of those registered file types, Search will never report its existence. Thanks, Microsoft! That's really useful!

All is not lost. You can tell the Search feature to search ALL files. It's a setting that you need change only once, so I'd recommend you do it now so that you don't fall into this trap later. here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

Click Start and then Search. The Search window starts up.
Click Change preferences.
Click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
Click Change Indexing Service settings (Advanced).
The Indexing Service window opens.
Click the Show/Hide Console Tree button. (or click the View menu, then Customize..., and then check Console Tree and click OK)
Right-click the Indexing Service on Local Machine folder and select Properties.
Check the Index files with unknown extensions box.
Click OK.
Close the Indexing Service window, and you're done!

From now on, whenever you do a Search, it will not ignore any files, and you'll find what you're looking for (assuming it REALLY is there!).