Search File Contents

OK, so you're running Windows 7 and you want to find all files that contact a certain piece of text.

It's simple isn't it - just go to the folder type in the text at the top right, and all the files are magically returned?  I know there are 2 files in C:\TEMP containing the text elephant so I go to the folder and type in elephant in the top right

Strange - no matching items..  Ah - I need to click on File Contents so that Windows 7 now searches the file contents and not the file names

Only 1 file found?  What's happening here?

By default Windows 7 will only search contents for certain file types.  You can add to this list of file types by performing a whole lot of messing about but what a lot of fuss just to do something the OS should do out of the box.

If you're an advanced user you might be thinking DOS is the way to go.  So go to the Command Prompt, type in CD \TEMP and then find "elephant" * and hey presto

What?  Access Denied!  This is a problem that is even harder to fix than adding to the list of file types that will be searched.

So where does this leave us?

There's a simple solution.  Forget Windows 7's built-in search and use the excellent and highly respected text editor Notepad++.  Just install, run and to bring up the search dialog - from the top menu select Search and then Find in files..

Enter the text you want to search for and the directory to start searching from

Click on Find All

Perfect, it shows both files and as a bonus double-clicking the text will open the file at the location where the search text is.

Now why couldn't Windows 7 make it that easy?  Maybe it'll be fixed in Windows 8..

Disable AutoPlay

To disable auto-playing of CD/DVDs or removable drives you can do it by modifying the registry. Or you can use the excellent TweakUI, it's part of the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP.

Windows XP Reinstall

My sister had a virus on her PC which resulted in it going in a reboot loop when starting Windows. None of the safe boot options fixed it and it was due a reinstall. Unfortunately it was manufactured by Maxdata who went into liquidation last year.

She'd lost the restore CD that came with the PC and we couldn't get a replacement so I did a vanilla XP install. This worked but the graphics/audio devices weren't detected. I found a really good tool which detected the motherboard type - it's called CPU-Z



As you can see from the screenshot it detected the motherboard type (P5DVC-TVM) and then a google search found the appropriate drivers, which in this case were on rm.com.

The chipset drivers need to be installed before any the audio,graphic and LAN drivers.

Call Recording

For reasons I wont go into here I wanted to be able to record calls on my Treo Pro. I thought this would be simple enough. I tried two programs:

1. Resco Audio Recorder for Pocket PC (v4.51)
2. Vito Audio Notes (v1.37)

Both of them only worked if the phone was set to speaker phone which wasn't what I really wanted. I found a post on the TreoCentral Discussion Forums which confirmed that this is to do with the hardware and is the same with all Windows Mobile phones.

Oh well.