I’m sorry, Microsoft, but the build in Search utility (especially in Windows XP) just doesn’t always work. I’m not one to just look for a third party app, but in this particular case, I had a customer needing to search for the proverbial “needle in a haystack” against a large folder of generated data files.
I happily came across Mythicsoft FileLocator Lite and it was the right solution for the right problem at the right price (free!).
Unlike most file locator programs, it does NOT create and maintain an indexing file, but you would be surprised at how fast it is!