Say I want to find all files that begin with ‘123’ and are doc files.
I would search (including subfolders) for “123*.doc”
Not any more in Vista (Apparently) What a complete and utter fuckup of a fuckup in an OS. To me it’s like taking all but the driver’s door off a car, and saying “Oh we thought we wouldn’t include passenger doors in the new version…We’ve decided you don’t need them”
Does anyone know how I can do searches like I used to, (not using a command prompt)
Works for me. Vista Home Edition Premium.
So it doesn’t do what mine is doing, and find every file with some lose connection with the search criteria, such as “123*.doc” finding “hello -1 and 23.xls”?
edit: so you can do a search for files that only BEGIN with something (such as 123)?
Explain your steps…
The SO is running Vista Ultimate X64 SP1 and had no problems using the splat for wildcard even with indexing off and reports that using the question mark to search for individual characters also works. Not sure what you’re doing wrong there, mang, but it does appear that Vista’s wildcard searching is okay.
He does say that the default search area is in My Documents so if you don’t point at a specific drive to search you may be limiting your searches only to the My Docs folder. He says he’s caught himself doing this a couple times without realizing that the OS is only searching My Docs, because well–that’s kinda stupid. Nice to know MicroSlave is still onboard with dumb ideas…
Try changing your search area and see if that helps some.
I’ve known how to do file searches for over ten years. I know what I’m doing.
If I specifically want all files that begin with ‘123’ (i.e. not files that contain 123 somewhere in their name) I would do a search on a specific folder for 123*.* but this doesn’t work for me in vista. the 123 gets all files that have 123 (sometimes not even consecutively) in their name, and if I add the wildcards i get nothing.
No.
Yes. I open the Start Menu, and click Search. In the search window, I enter my criteria in the dialog box at the upper right of the window. I used Death*.txt, and it returned all of my DeathPool text documents:
Vista search is “enhanced”. To get the normal behavior try this - From Windows Explorer, expand the ‘Organize’ tab and click on ‘Folder and Search Options’. Go to the ‘Search’ tab and uncheck the ‘Find partial matches’ option.
Maybe this is it. Maybe not, Vista can be a little annoying like this.
Sorry all. I’m an idiot.
I had a dash in the wrong place.
