this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Everything is amazing. It really shouldn't be that amazing. After decades windows should be able to have a working search function. I'm just so disappointed the default icon isn't an everything bagel. The only thing I have on my laptop desktop is a shortcut to everything (with a custom bagel icon).
Bummer, our IT blocks it because its freeware. Can't even get to the site.
Aww, man, that blows.
Go talk to your IT folks, maybe show it to them on your laptop (of you have a personal one).
It really is a game changer.
Another option is an old school way - map a drive, open a Command Prompt, cd to the drive you want an index of. Then run: dir *. * /s>dir.txt
This runs the directory command in the current directory, saying "show all files" (*. *), include ALL subdirectories too, then send the output to a file in the current directory called dir.Txt
You can then search through that file more quickly than searching directories manually.
The initial file creation may take a couple minutes (and hammer the daylights out of the file system while it's running).
Another tool is the tree command:
Tree w:\ /f > tree.txt
This will parse the w: drive, including all files, (/f) and write the output to tree.txt
This is also a searchable text file.
If you can't write to those directories, you can simply run the commands from a directory you can write to, or use paths to the output files - use this for the output file names:
Yeah I'm not allowed to create files via terminal either. Unauthorized access, even to my own desktop.
Ah I have used tree but didnt even think about writing it to text to search! Very clever. Thank you for the ideas !
I'm almost positive if i go to the team with this solution, they will instantly go bug eye and say "we can have ai do that!!!!!!!!!1!!1!1!1!" Which I really do not want. We already waste tens of thousands a month for useless slopbots that do nothing and are inaccurate, just plain dangerous for our line of work too. I think people have completely forgotten that software tools exist, not only a scam altman supercomputer subscription.
Le sigh.
I'm all about locking down machines, I get it - social engineering and the inattentiveness of users is a real risk.
But wow (and I don't even know how you restrict the command prompt like that, wonder of they're using a third-party security tool).
Can you run those commands without output to a text file, and just copy the results? The command prompt got a lot better with like XP and lets you copy all (click on the icon in it's title bar, it should show a few commands).