As a heavy XP user that had not used Vista much, I had quite a bout with the OS at my brother's house with Vista on his laptop. As an aside, I tried Win 7 beta very briefly and didn't like it.

But here's what troubled me. My brother, being a PC novice, wanted me to find a file on his PC and make a copy for his desktop. I used the so-called 'search' function to look for it. But the stupid search only wanted to know what program to open it with, it didn't tell me where the @#$%&!! it was located on his drive!!

I had to manually search for the file and find it that way, which was tedious. Although I had a good idea about where it would be.

If it had been XP, it would have told me where the stupid file was. Microsoft is making things more difficult, not easier. And I'm sure the Win 7 search function would have left me with the same problem. But I wiped out my Win 7 beta install a while ago so I can't be absolutely certain.

Hit windows key.

Type the name of the file into the search bar and see if it automatically comes up.

Do advanced search if it doesn't come up on the first try.

Well next time I'm there I'll try that but it's too late now. I'm back home in Utah now, just got home last night on a jet plane.

Here's something else you can try:

1) try doing something in Vista

2) get frustrated after 5 minutes and come to the conclusion that Vista obviously completely sucks



eh just kidding but it seems like people do this with Vista. The search function doesn't always bring back the results I expect but generally it's good. What does annoy me is that it automatically saves stuff like pictures in a "pictures" folder that is buried under Users instead of putting it on my desktop or in some other folder. That can make it hard and frustrating to find stuff, though I think XP did this too.