Re: file searching

[Matt Gumm mattgumm@xxxxxxxx]

I've had success with X1. It's a partner with Yahoo (used to be Yahoo search, I think). There is a free version, which will index your local drives, and the professional version, which lets you index network drives. 
 
 
 
I got it mainly for work, because it was one of the few programs that could index the WordPerfect format (and the only free one), but it has a variety of uses. It can index Outlook mail items, which seems like it would be great. We don't have outlook, so I can't comment on how well that works. 
 
 
 
You can choose the level of indexing (ie, which folders you want full content, or omit folders altogether), and you can schedule the indexing (I have mine go at noon, while I'm away for lunch, but you can also do it at midnight, etc.). There is also an option to start indexing after the computer has been idle for a certain amount of time.
 
 
 
It seems to handle goofy file
 extensions ok. I have a poem that I wrote in 1993 entitled poem.1 that it brings up fine. I did some ASCII Art in WordPerfect 5.1 format that doesn't fair quite as well, but I doubt you're talking about something that obscure. 
 
 
 
 
 
You can look at it and download a copy from here: http://www.x1.com/
 
 
 
Matt Gumm

Bill Troop  wrote:
 
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!


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