Page 187 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

GEM IN THE ROUGH BEYOND YOUR OWN STUFF

Ordinarily, Windows searches only what’s in your account—your
personal folder. From the search box, you can’t search somebody else’s

stuff.

Yet you can search someone else’s account—just not from the search
box and not without permission.

Start by opening the This PC Users folder. Inside, you’ll find folders
for all other account holders. Open the one you want to search, and then
search using the search box at the top of the File Explorer window.

You won’t be given access, though, without first supplying an
administrator’s password. (You don’t have to know it; you could just
call an administrator over to type it in.) After all, the whole point of

having different accounts is to ensure privacy for each person—and
only the administrator, or an administrator, has full rein to stomp

through anyone’s stuff.

Windows stores all this information in an invisible, multimegabyte file

called, creatively enough, the index. (If your primary hard drive is creaking
full, you can specify that you want the index stored on some other drive; see
“File Types tab”.)

After that, Windows can produce search results in seconds. It doesn’t have

to search your entire hard drive—only that card-catalog index file.

After the initial indexing process, Windows continues to monitor what’s on
your hard drive, indexing new and changed files in the background, in the

microseconds between your keystrokes and clicks.

Where Windows Looks

In the May 2019 edition of Windows, Windows is prepared to search either
of two universes of data, which you specify in → → Search →
Searching Windows: