More on creating bootable USB drives

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	LANGALIST PLUS More on creating bootable USB drives
	By Fred Langa Some additional tips, tricks, and free tools can help get balky, ‘unformattable’ flash drives working again. Plus: A simple workaround for unusually slow Win8 updates, dozens of tools to simplify cloning CDs and DVDs, and a free tool for lightning-fast file-name searching.

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The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/langalist-plus/more-on-creating-bootable-usb-drives/ (paid content, opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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I’m also a fan of “Everything” as usually it’s a filename I’m searching for rather than the contents of a file. Even now I know the syntax for Windows Search (I can’t use Everything at work) although I still haven’t managed to get it to work without a UAC prompt which is a downside.

Windows 7 was supposed to be the version of Windows that finally didn’t need third party search tools, but it’s so clunky and unintuitive to use. I still miss the ability to right click on a folder to search it. Why do I have to type System.filename: even XP was better, I could just type the filename into a search field.

What we need is for someone to write a new context menu search tool that uses Windows existing index, but uses a form based approach with fields like filename, rather than trying to do away with the fields by forcing you to use/remember arcane syntax.

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I still haven’t managed to get it to work without a UAC prompt which is a downside.

See:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/run-uac-restricted-programs-without-the-uac-prompt/730

Jerry

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Hi Fred,
Agree with you and Douglas, that “Everything” is quick & okay to use for file names; and with you, that that is it the end of “Everything”‘s helpfulness.

However, I completely disagree about Windows search being any use at all. Once I tested Windows 7, and found to my horror the lack of tiered searchability, I resisted upgrading until my old PC died and I was forced to update.

My work computer was updated earlier than home, so I would save up searches to do them on my home PC. Not an efficient or effective way to look for things – and I was carting all my data around on external drives. Windows search had become so intensely frustrating that it reminded me of what the Russian verb ‘to buy’ came to mean under communism: “to procure with great difficulty” (hah! Or “not at all”, in some instances).

I know that the team at Windows Secrets posted a great range of sorta kinda code strings that enabled users (somewhat) to do tiered searches, but I found that klunky, not user-friendly, and didn’t always work. I had to look up, or guess, code all the time, as my brain doesn’t create the associations to remember that stuff.

Then I got a great piece of advice, and I downloaded FileSearchEX; which really is a fantastic bit of software. It costs USD$30. I have set it up to show on my right-mouse pop-up menu, and it is pinned to the taskbar. It does everything the old Windows searches used to do. I can run my search just once by defining a few parameters – such as for words in the title, eg “*James*.pdf”; AND some words within the file, eg “Birthday”; AND by date (between today and six months ago).

It knocks Microsoft’s native Windows search into a cocked hat. I paid a little for FileSearchEX, but man – for the hours of total, hair-tearing out frustration it saved me, it was worth an awful lot more than $30.

Check it out at http://goffconcepts.com/products/filesearchex/index.html

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Hi Fred,

Okay, first bit of feedback. Your column covers five subjects (bootable USB drives, Windows 8 updates, cloning CDs/DVDs, free search tools) and I want to comment on one of them. Hence, this feedback has nothing to do with bootable USB drives, but this is where your Windows Secrets link for feedback takes me… so here it is.

Free search tools. Have you noticed how bad Windows handles searching on network drives and the lame solution for speeding up fast searches using indexes is? Options include copying the entire contents of your network drive to one of your fixed drives (really Windows? That’s a solution? Copy terrabytes of data to your fixed gigabyte size system drive?) or use some dodgy logical link solution that sometimes works, sometimes works for a while, sometimes never works?

After a bit of research I found out that it really isn’t Windows fault. What Windows does (and I’m talking lots of versions here) is to expect its’ network drives to (1) be Windows based and (2) do the indexing ‘natively’ then have those available for Windows to access and read. Windows itself doesn’t do the indexing. Too bad if (1) your D-Link network drive uses a version of Linux as its operating system and (2) it doesn’t create the index for Windows to use. I’ve re-visited this problem a number of times over the last few years and finally a (sort of) solution has appeared. I have a discovered a third party application that will build an index of a drive for quick searches. It also ties in to Scheduler so you can update the index automatically and lets you configure enormously complicated searches that you’ll never use. You can’t have Explorer use it directly but it is still very flexible. Try LOCATE (http://www.locate32.net). Not an ideal solution (would be great if it built an Explorer readable index) but it’s not bad.

Anyway, might help all those people with slow to read, non Windows network drives.

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