file searching

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

I'm happily back to XyWrite with a new Dell 1720 and Vista. No
problems so far -- just copied the files over, and everything just
worked. Haven't tried printing yet. (Not at all impressed with Vista,
but I can live with it.)
But here's a question. Because of having started off in the DOS 8.3
days, I have used the 8.3 format in various unwise ways. Many many
files have no extension. Why should I put one when I could save
myself the trouble of typing it? In other cases, I have used private
extensions of no use to the OS, such as 'nte' for notes, or ba1, ba2,
ba3 etc. to denominate versions.
The problem comes now, all these years and GB of data later, when I
need to be able to search these files.
None of the file indexing solutions (Spotlight on Mac, Windows
search, Google) seems to be able to deal with files with unknown or
improper extensions.
What do I do? Gradually rename all my historic files (making them
unreadable in XyWrite, unless there really is a solution that allows
long(er) file names)? (I assume that some of the powerful traditional
DOS tools for global renaming are still extant in Vista?) Or is there
some modern search/indexing program that deals with my kind of
problem scenario.
The other thing that worries me, now that I have this nice new and
quite snappy machine, is installing a search/indexing system that
won't slow the whole thing down.

Any suggestions?
Otherwise, I must say it is very nice to be back writing in XyWrite.
There really is nothing like it!