[oskee80]

I started using Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/) to help mitigate XP's slow searching and still use it today, even with Win7's much improved search functionality.

Everything Search only indexes file names, so you can't search via date modified or anything like that, but it is super-fast and supports regular expressions. Need to find a word doc that begins with 'ca'? Just type '^ca.*\.docx?', instant results.

[baddox]

Everything is a must-have Windows utility. It's blazingly fast (because it's searching file names only) and up-to-date (presumably because it's watching the NTFS change journal).

You can also install the client on multiple networked PCs, run the "ETP Server," and search a remote computer's files, and double-clicking a result will open the SMB path to that file. I use this all the time to quickly find videos on my file server.