Everything is the best file search utility on Windows

Google kicked off a wave of desktop search utilities that produced clones from Microsoft and Yahoo, and eventually got this functionality baked into the OS. However, only the Yahoo utility was ever that useful to me. That's because you could actually set it to index all of the files on your computer, including system files, program files, hidden files, etc. These are the files I'm most interested in. Whether I'm trying to see if a particular piece of malware is on the computer, tracking down a program I installed, or looking for a file that was downloaded into a hidden Temp folder, most of my use cases involve files outside of my Documents folder.

There are a few problems with Yahoo! Desktop Search, tho. They stopped supporting it years ago, pushing people who want updates and support to pay a 3rd party. Second, it actually was overkill for what I needed, indexing the contents of all files rather than just the file names. Finally, it doesn't work very well on Win7. It crashes a lot.

I recently discovered Everything, and it's perfect for my needs. It only indexes the file name, but it does so for every file on your computer. It's wicked fast. And it works great on Win7. This utility has an official spot on my "core Windows apps and utilities."