Best way to *confidently* search files and contents in Windows without using an indexing service? [closed]

Back in Windows XP I knew that doing a file search and checking "Search file contents" (or whatever it was) I would get my results if I waited patiently.

In Vista, I felt I had absolutely no confidence that what I had typed had been thoroughly searched for, even with all the "Search non-indexed locations" etc. checked.

In Windows 7 I feel better and usually find stuff, but am suspicious when I don't. I'm not left feeling "confident".

I don't want (the weight of) Google Desktop.

I want a solid, brute file search utility. I found one I thought looked good recently (installed Windows 7 RTM last week and can't remember what it was called) but it still didn't seem to find files I placed as tests.

Agent Ransack is excellent -- it's fast, lightweight (single <1 MB application), powerful (regular expression matching of file names and content), and you can trust the results.

You also have a perfectly good copy of PowerShell sitting there on your Windows 7 install:

Get-ChildItem C:\* -Recurse | Select-String 'foo'

You could even add an alias to your profile for Select-String called grep and then do:

ls C:\* -r | grep 'foo'

I always use the find-in-files feature of Notepad++ for my brute-force searches.