Bill D -

That external drive L: must be a thumb drive?

My External drive where I keep my Mudcat folder shows about 5,000 files just for keeping track of the babel here - but that's mostly just for threads I've participated in. I have a couple of separate folders for "mudcat policies and advice" and one for recording significant or unusually interesting comments by others. That last one has dozens (~2?) of "flashes of brilliance" that might be worth quoting someday. (I've got a separate folder for Spaw's creations, of course, but I'm not sure I've found all of the "best of Spaw.")

I recall that not too long ago I had to go down to the public library to download a document that was "too big" for my dial-up connection to handle, and it took two cycles (they only allow an hour at a time on their computers). Turns out that it was only 60 MB but that was "big" back then. Microsoft sends me patches that big now - weekly.

Just recently a refreshed thread reminded me of a song book that I'd intended to digitize, so I took a break and scanned it to a pdf. It took about 6 hours, but the pdf is 290 MB and my email account can't send it to anybody. I split it down to a pdf for each song, but then found that the person who wanted "that kind of stuff" hasn't posted for almost two years - so it's in limbo (but off my bookshelf) for now. (A frat house songbook I picked up at a garage sale, if anybody's really interested: approx 100 songs, most with 4-part scores, 214 pp. Beta Theta Phi ©1942 The full book compresses to "web resolution" at about 37,800 KB, but I havent' tried to see if my email send bucket will swallow it at that size.)

I've found that one thing that's "new and improved" in Vista is the Search function in Windows Explorer. The improvement appears to be that it doesn't work so you don't really need to bother with it. I have, several times copied the filename of a file on my drive, pasted it into search and asked for it to be found. I get 5,000 files returned, none of which have anything to do with the file I asked for, and the filename I pasted is not included.

It apparently is necessary to add "tags" to any files you want to be able to find. My backup of my personal documents includes 1,325,985 File(s) (NOT including any System or Program files), so obviously I need to go through them and "tag" each one(?). Of course to tag each one properly I'd have to open each one, and some of them are just too #!$@%## boring to look at when I don't really need them for somethig.

Even without tags, Vista takes about 3 weeks to complete "indexing so search will work better" (i.e. not at all) on a new drive or folder with a significant portion of my files on it. Although indexing "runs in background" it does interfere with use until it's done. Once indexing is completed, "it doesn't work at all even better," I suppose.

My solution (note use of a euphemism) is a batch file that makes a list of every file, within the folder it's in when it runs, using the very simple Command Prompt DIR command, and saves the list in a text file. My current version finds all documents (.do* file extension) and lists them in one !docs.txt file. Similarly for each .txt, .jpg, .wmv, .pdf, etc. If I open one of the text files in Word, search in Word can find any word or word fragment that's in a filename in about 10 seconds maximum, so that I can go directly to the file. (some of the text files, if I run at top level folders, run close to 20,000 pages when opened in Word, so even Word pants and gasps occasionally, but most people will have far fewer files.)

  dir *.do* /s >!doc.txt
  dir *.pdf /s >!pdf.txt
  dir *.jpg /s >!jpg.txt
  dir *.ht* /s >!htm.txt
  dir *.mh* /s >!mht.txt
  dir *.xl* /s >!xls.txt
  dir *.db* /s >!dbx.txt
  dir *.wmv /s >!wmv.txt
  dir *.ti* /s >!tif.txt
  dir *.mi* /s >!mid.txt
  dir *.eml /s >!eml.txt

You can copy and paste the above into a file and save as "plain text" .txt (I called mine "!listall.txt,").

The <pre> tag I used inserts an extraneous space at the beginning of each line when you copy. You can delete it to make it look neater, but Command Line (DOS) ignores spaces so it should be optional.

Once the text file is saved, change the .txt to .bat (!listall.bat).

You can paste the .bat file into any folder you want to index and when you double-click it, it should produce separate .txt files for each kind of file in that folder and all subfolders.

The "!" at the beginning of the filenames just is so that the resulting files will be at the top of the list (after the subfolders) in Win Explorer when you go back to look at them (if you sort by filenames).

The "*" is a "wildcard," and - for example - in the .doc (.do*) line it lets the search include .doc, .dot .docx, .dotx, .docm, dotm etc.

If you have other kinds of files of interest, you can just add (or delete) a line. If it "looks like" one of the other lines, except for a different file extension, it will probably work.

If you rerun the .bat, it will replace the exisitng .txt files with new versions, so if you want to save "what was" before running you should move them to a different folder. The .bat will create any file that doesn't already exist.

Once it's a .bat file, you can right click and "Edit" easily to tweak it to suit your purposes, without going back through .txt format.

Crude perhaps, but it works - because Search in your Word Processor (even if it's not Word) probably works and Search in Vista doesn't (at least for me).

John