Stephen Wright once famously said “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

Knowing him, he probably said it more than once.  Stand-up comics are like that.  And as much as I enjoy Stephen Wright, he’s wrong.  There is a place to put everything, and that’s on your hard drive.  Pictures, movies, documents, music, favorite blog entries – it can all go there.  And with a 2 terabyte hard drive going for $120 delivered, you can have even more of everything.

Then comes the big problem.  You know you have something in that big collection of everything, but how do you find it?

Easy – with Everything!  VoidTools is giving away their nifty little search tool, and it’s a doozy.  You search by name – this doesn’t look inside files.  But it works very fast and very well.  It has already saved me twice in the last day.  Once, I was editing and saving a file I had opened from an email.  Unfortunately, the file wasn’t where I thought it was.  I panicked as my last hour’s worth of work seemed to disappear.  Everything found it, though, in my temporary internet files, and I was able to recover it.  The second time was when I was looking for the church logo for yesterday’s blog entry.  I typed in connections and it located the 64 items matching that name, and I quickly found the file I was looking for.

Everything is tiny – under 350K.  It’s fast – it will index your hard drive in a few minutes.  It’s cool – the opening screen shows you everything on your disk (hence the name) and it narrows down the choices as you type.  And it’s sufficiently geeky – it understands regular expressions.

Everything has become my search tool of choice.  It stays running in my taskbar, monitoring file changes in real time.  It starts up automatically, and it’s there whenever I need to do a search.

As a search tool, it really is – dare I say it? – Everything I need.

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