Smarter searches

[admin]

When you enter a snippet of text in the Search box at the bottom of the Start menu, the results come from just about everywhere: programs, e-mail, files, even your browser history. You can control which categories appear in Start menu searches using these settings in the Customize Start Menu dialog box (available from a link on the Appearance and Personalization group in Control Panel).

When you enter a snippet of text in the Search box at the bottom of the Start menu, the results come from just about everywhere: programs, e-mail, files, even your browser history. You can control which categories appear in Start menu searches using these settings in the Customize Start Menu dialog box (available from a link on the Appearance and Personalization group in Control Panel).

Indexing for experts: Click the Advanced button to open this dialog box, where you can rebuild the index (handy if you notice that searches aren’t working as they’re supposed to), move the index to a faster drive, and (on the File Types tab) include or exclude particular types of files from the index. One last set of search options can be found on the Search tab in the Folder Options dialog box. These are the super-geek options, controlling how Windows Vista does searches. If you’re willing to take the performance hit, you can expand searches to look in locations and in file types that aren’t normally indexed.