Windows XP: Fix The Search!

This is an old one but I keep needing it every once in a while.  Every time when I start using a new machine running Windows XP to be precise.  So I thought I’d post it here so next time I don’t need to spend five minutes looking to find the right page.

Recently I needed to find all SSIS packages that were using a particular view and I performed a Windows Search on all .dtsx files in my project’s folder, searching for the view’s name.  And it didn’t give me any results even though I knew there were a couple of packages that were using it.  Is the search broken?

And then I remembered: no, it’s not broken.  Let’s just say that XP’s default settings are not ideal for developers (or power users in general I’d say).  By default XP does not search all file types!  And it’s a feature, not a bug!

Anyway, luckily the “fix” is not that complicated.  My preferred way of fixing this is Method 2 in this Microsoft Support article: Using the “A word or phrase in the file” search criterion may not work.

Interesting to know, this is not a feature in Windows XP only, Windows Server 2003 got it as well.