Having a world of information within the palm of your hand is a great and powerful thing. Being able to access that information - instantly - with a few clicks and some typing is something long sought after and something that anyone can benefit from.

If you have been using Windows for a while, I am sure you have run into several issues when it comes to finding the file you're looking for on your harddrive (HDD). Generally, starting off the process of finding what you want is easy - you open the search feature on Windows, you type what you are looking for and then you search. And then you wait, and wait..and wait. When the search process is finally completed, you turn up empty handed.

Why empty handed? Well, maybe because you were tired of Windows being "slow" and decided to follow a performance improvement article that advised you to turn off the indexing service or your system hasn't been idle enough to index that part of your HDD. Either way, regardless of the reason, it's not part of Windows's search's database and so you won't find it through Windows's search.

If Windows search has not indexed the location of the file on your HDD, it is as good as your file not existing. There is simply no way to access information through a search engine if that engine does not know it exists. So what now? Well, you have a few choices:

1. Re-enable the indexing services on your computer and allow it to sit idle over a long period of time

2. Re-enable the indexing service and start a manual index build

Either of these methods require you to wait, and we all know that waiting is the last thing you want to do…

Enter the our first Curious Finding, the wonderful program called Everything by VoidTools, and all these problems disappear.

With the installation of a really small program (293 KB at time of writing), you can access every file on any local NTFS drive on your system - instantly. You simply run Everything, type a search in the search box and the results are instantly (or close enough to instantly) displayed. The best part is, you don't need to wait forever for Everything to index your drive because it does that pretty much instantly too - and - without the use of or need for the Windows indexing service.

So, what are you waiting for? Download Everything and see for yourself just how useful and powerful Everything really is. Oh, and did I mention it supports regular expressions (regex) too?

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 or Windows Vista

License: "Everything" is completely free.

Download: [Everything]