Mouse Clix

By: Hobie Lunin

Find a needle in a haystack!

One of the great little conveniences in Windows is the “Find” utility. It resides just above Start after you have clicked on it. Then point to Find; click on Files or Folders. A small window comes up that has three tabs in it. The one on top is Name & Location. This screen is probably the most useful. Along the top, click on View and then on Details. Instead of just bringing up a list, if you have checked this, you will learn where the file is and how large it is bytes.

Let’s say you put a photo in a file somewhere and you can’t seem to locate it. Let’s say that you remember that it was named Xmas and it had the year next but you don’t remember the year. Let’s say you are not sure what drive it is in and you have several drives. You can click the down arrow in the Look In window and select My Computer. Type Xmas in the Named window and then type in an asterisk. This is on the same key as the 8 and is used as a wild card in Find. So you would type in Xmas*.jpg. Or if you did not even remember what the file extension is you would type Xmas*.* , and then click on Find Now. In the window that will open up, all the files that can be identified this way will appear. If you need to, you can click on any of them to open and see the photo. When you have found the right one you can see the location of the file in the In Folder column.

Suppose you are looking for a photo and have no memory of the name and just know that it is in a .jpg format, then type in *.jpg, and all the .jpg photos will appear. You can browse through them to see if any name rings a bell as you scan the list. Or if it is a text file and you can remember a few words in it that may not be in any other document you can put the text in the Containing text and see what documents pop up.

If you still can’t find what you are looking for, try clicking on the date tab and then see if you can figure about when it was that you generated that file you are looking for. The Advanced Tab can do a search through some specific folders but it helps to have an idea how big the file is. It’s a good idea to try this out a few times to get the feel of it with files you actually know and see how easily the file can be located. This keeps the problem of locating files from getting frustrating. It is also great for detective work.

I was asked by a client to see what was filling up a computer hard drive to the point that it was full. I went to Programs and clicked on Windows Explorer, right clicked the C drive icon and left clicked on Properties. The pie chart showed that the drive was nearly full and that there was no pie section for unused drive, just a straight line. Only trouble can be expected if you don’t leave at least ten percent of your drive unused. I know that photos and music files are often the culprits. I asked the owner what file extensions were usually used for their photos. The response was .jpg and .bmp. In general .bmp (bitmap) files are larger and so by trying *.bmp, I was able to see a complete list of them. I clicked on the larger ones one at a time and the owner was able to delete most of them as no longer being needed.

We went back to check on the status of the C drive and there was a slight improvement. I looked around a bit and saw some MP3 files in the hard drive. With a teenager in the house I suspected music files were the culprits. I typed *.mp3 in the find window and a long list of music files showed up. The size of the each file is shown to the right of the name of the file and there were some up to 20 MB each. These were large files and there were a lot of them. We now knew what the problem was. The solution was up to the owner!

Next I was asked what we could do to increase the available space in the Hard Drive? I remembered another handy little utility. I clicked on Start, then pointed to Settings and clicked on Control Panel and then on Add/Remove Programs. A list that appears includes programs in the computer that can be removed in that utility. By highlighting programs that were no longer being used, and then clicking on Remove we were able to increase the available hard drive to 15% in very short order.

One other utility you may not have noticed is in the same Find utility we looked at above. This is the place where it says People. You can use this while you are on the Internet and want to try to locate someone. After you are in Find, click on People. Enter all the information that you know about them on that screen. Go on to the Internet and keep trying the list of Internet sites to help find that person, by clicking the down arrowhead to the right of the top field and trying each of those sites in turn. You may just find that person you are looking for.

For more information about finding files and/or people click the Help that appears above the Start button when clicked and then type in the word “find.”

Hobie Lunin will answer questions at hlunin@email.com. See http://mouseclix.tripod.com for previous articles and other information.