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Loading ...On the face of it, Windows Vista looks as though it might be little more than its predecessor, Windows XP, with some extra double glazing on top, courtesy of fancy visual effects.However, behind the scenes, Microsoft’s programmers have been hard at work creating new ways to find and organise files.The result? A filing system that’s familiar enough to use almost immediately, but which also contains new features that make XP look like a forgetful old duffer.
Thanks to services such as Google, we’ve become used to finding the stuff we want with relative ease, whether it’s a document about Renaissance medicine, some clipart suitable for the local sports club website or a photo of a melting iceberg.
It’s not just Google either these days everything falls over itself to help us find definitions (www.dictionary.com), people (www.facebook.com), photos (www.flickr.com) and pretty much whatever else we want.
So why shouldn’t the PC on our desk be able to do the same? With Windows Vista, it can straight out of the tin. That’s not to say there’s no effort involved, but thanks to several new features Vista is able to find and organise all kinds of files and documents better than before.
Searching
The new search feature is a vast improvement on the one offered by Windows XP. For a start, it can be used from the Start button and from individual folder windows. Second, it’s about a zillion times faster than previous versions. It also starts finding things as soon as the first character has been typed into a search box. Try it.
Click the Start button and then begin typing in the word ‘Autumn’ one character at a time. As the ‘A’ appears, Vista begins listing items such as ‘Autoplay’, but by the time ‘Autu’ has been typed in, you’ll see ‘Autumn Leaves’ one of the photographs that’s included in Vista’s Sample Pictures folder and in this example, the very thing we’re looking for.
The new Search feature will pick up items from anywhere in Vista’s index of files and that’s the reason it’s so fast, because it looks through an index for matches, rather than rummaging through the actual files as XP does. Vista builds its index of a PC’s hard disk contents when it’s not doing other things, and chances are most people won’t even notice the process going on; it’s also possible to add or remove folders from the index, or store it elsewhere to increase performance even more.
As well as finding file names (like ‘Autumn Leaves’ above) Vista can also look inside documents and scan the contents. To see this in action, we’ll have to cheat a bit and either find a document that we know contains a particular word or phrase, or create one and then save it in the Documents folder (this is the default so there’s no need to change any settings).
Having done that, click the Start menu and then open the Documents folder. Click in the empty Search box at the top right and then type in the word or phrase and Vista will once again retrieve the right document (click the Organize button, Layout and then Preview Pane and it’ll display the contents of certain files as well). It’s not even necessary to add Google-style double quote marks in order to find the whole phrase rather than the individual words Vista can sort it out unaided.
Top trumps
On the occasions that Vista doesn’t come up trumps, turn to the Advanced Search feature, which appears as a link in the main search results window.
Clicking this opens a plethora of options that allow you to search by location, date, file size, author and tag (of which more later).
If it’s the kind of search that needs to be performed regularly for example at the end of every month then click the Save Search button to add it to Vista’s list of searches.
You can review these by clicking the Searches link in the Favorite Links list on the left of the main folder window where there are all sorts of useful queries, such as ‘Recently Changed’ or ‘Shared By Me’.
Vista usually does a decent job of picking the right folders to include in the index, but occasionally there might be information that people would prefer wasn’t displayed in search results accounts, business letters, even photos that are being held back for that surprise Christmas calendar in which case it’s possible to exclude specific folders from being indexed.
The easiest way is to navigate to the folder in question, right-click on it and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. When the dialogue box appears, make sure the General tab is selected and then click the Advanced button. Remove the tick next to the ‘Index this folder for faster searching’ option and click OK to confirm.
There are various ways to speed up the index, but by far the easiest and most effective is if the PC has a spare, fast hard disk, perhaps fitted for backing up files. We showed how to fit a spare hard disk in issue 250. Click the Start button and then type ‘index’ into the search box. When the dialogue opens, click the Advanced button and then click New at the next dialogue. Use Vista’s browse commands to select the new location for the index and then click OK. To complete the process, restart the PC and the new index is ready for action.
Stacking
Those who’ve spent any time with Windows will probably be familiar with the notion of arranging files and folders by name, size, type and date modified, and recognise that it’s a useful way to look at the contents of a folder particularly a large folder.
Vista introduces a new way of arranging folders, called stacking, which enables users to group documents, photos, pictures, music and anything else stored on the hard disk in more ways than before. Stacking becomes even more useful when we get into tagging files a bit later on, but even before that, it offers plenty of options.
Try this. Open the Documents folder and right-click on an empty space. When the menu appears, click the Stack By menu item and then choose More from the submenu. Here there are 265 different categories that can be used to stack files and folders together, from simple criteria such as author and date modified right through to bit rate (for music) and focal length (for photos).
Try using one of the preset categories: right-click in a folder, choose Stack By and then Date modified. Vista will display the files and folders, splitting them into little stacks labelled ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Last Week’, ‘Earlier this month’, ‘Earlier this year’ and ‘A long time ago’. Using simple phrases such as these makes it much easier for us ordinary humans to browse for items that we may have forgotten in name, but recall working on at some vague point in the past.
Alternatively, try opening the Music folder and then stacking the contents by genre, which makes it possible to enjoy all of the library’s rock or folk or country tracks in one go without having to put them into a playlist just click on the relevant stack and then click the Play all button on the button bar.
Note that files and folders aren’t moved from their original locations when using the Stacks feature. In fact, a quick look at the top line in the folder window reveals that stacking files and folders like this is part of the search feature, and that stacks can be saved like searches and used over again.
It’s with tagging, however, that stacks really come into their own, but in order to demonstrate that, we’ll have to tag a few files first.
Source: WhatPC
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