Windows 7 search sucks; speculating on USSC.

View 630 Wednesday, June 27, 2012

I hear a ton of speculations about why the court found parts of the Arizona illegal aliens laws unconstitutional while keeping the “Your papers, please,” provision that was really the heart of the Arizona system. Arizona cannot, according to the USSC, make it a state crime for an illegal alien to hold a job; but it can aid the feds if it discovers illegals in the ordinary course of the law enforcement business. It’s all arcane legalese and there’s not much common sense in it, but that’s what happens when you turn self government over to experts. If you don’t like this, take back your government.

And the speculations on why Roberts joined in getting rid of parts of the Arizona law continue, although it seems obvious to me. If you believe in states’ rights you also believe in federal rights, and that means you need some way to sort out who gets what cases. If you don’t the evil of double jeopardy looms higher and higher. But that’s for another essay.

Some of the wild speculation is a form of Kremlinology practiced on the Court itself, and that’s usually a rather feckless thing to do. We’ll just have to wait to see if there was some horse trading on the Obamacare decision. It shouldn’t be long.

My old editor Paul Schindler is coming over for a hike and due in a few minutes so I’ll post this and the account I wrote about scanpst for now. More on other stuff later.

Windows 7 search sucks.

One reason I continue to use Windows 7 rather than convert everything to a Mac is that I do like Microsoft Office, in large part because after this many years, books, columns mail, blogs, taxes, and the rest I’m pretty well used to it, and I’ve got past going off exploring new computer stuff just for the fun of it.

One program I use is Outlook, which over the years has evolved into something that works pretty well, particularly in my case. I get about 1,600 spam messages a day. My ISP catches about half of them. Outlook junk mail filters catch another 200. I have crafted a set of rules that get a lot more. My problem is that I need to see press releases – some of them – and spammers have become clever about sanding larger and larger clocks of plain text from Shakespeare or other legitimate sources to swamp the spam filters, and they still get through, — which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t send a dozen or so of the same message. Every day. Anyway, for good or ill, I am stuck with Outlook, and Outlook uses pst files which grow ever larger and larger.

Eventually a pst file will be interrupted in some way and become corrupt, and the next time you run Outlook you will be told to run scanpst.exe. Since scanpst.exe is always installed with office that ought to be easy, and it would be if I left Office in the place where Microsoft puts it, but for good reasons I keep Outlook in a root directory called C:\Outlook. Recently I got the “run scanpst.exe” message – and I couldn’t find scanpst anywhere. I mentioned this in the blog, and thanks to readers I can now find it, but it makes for an interesting story.

I found C:\Programfiles(x86)\Microsoftoffice\office12\scanpst.exe, thanks to readers. It’s there, but Windows 7 search doesn’t find it. Even an extended search. Interestingly, when I did Search on this machine, it found plenty of documents that referenced scanpst.exe, but no such program: however, when I did an extended search to “Computer” which includes searches of mapped drives on networked machines, search found scanpst.exe all right – on another machine, Emily. Meanwhile search on Emily fails to find scanpst.exe.

Windows 7 has a very fast search system in the sense that if it’s going to find something it finds it pretty fast. It does that by building indices in background. But the search isn’t thorough, it’s hard to use if it doesn’t find something instantly, and in general it sucks compared to the Search program Windows had from at least windows 95 through Windows XP. One wonders if Microsoft programmers use their own operating system, or if they have some secret egrep function they can run? Because this Windows 7 search system sucks dead bunnies.

I also experimented with opening a command window and trying to run scanpst. It cannot find the file. Try cd\ to get to the root. Run scanpst. Can’t find it. Work my way down the directories, cd Program Files (x86) and run scanpst. Can’t find it. Eventually I get to C:\Programfiles(x86)\Microsoftoffice\office12 and try to run scanpst, and LO! it works. Clearly I need to play with the registry to add that to the path to be searched for commands, and clearly I don’t care enough to do that. I’ll live with this, but Microsoft really should pay some attention to the current search function. The simplest think it could do is add the old Search we all got used to. The new system is fine but sometimes we really need to find something that the current search doesn’t believe in.

Regarding that Office12, that’s Office 2007. If you have Office 2010 that will be in the Office14 directory. Windows 7 is really easy to use except that it isn’t, sometimes. Just like the Mac OS, but with Mac you can, as a last resort, get to a command window with real like UNIX and egrep. And I wonder if the Microsoft programmers don’t have some secret method of doing that since they clearly don’t use the standard Windows 7 search. And so far none of this is fixed in any version of Windows 8 I have seen, but it’s very early days on that.

Windows 7 search

It is a little irritating when the search indices don’t yield desired results. Command prompt and a very old DOS command still works well. Result close to instantaneous when run on my heavily abused laptop.

C:\>dir /s scanpst.exe

Volume in drive C has no label.

Volume Serial Number is AEE1-B8B9

Directory of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15

04/08/2012 03:16 PM 40,088 SCANPST.EXE

1 File(s) 40,088 bytes

Regards,

Lee

Lee Coward

Which works just fine, and I had forgotten although I knew this at one time. Thanks!