The type of pdf files that are stored as an image, cannot be searched. Also, searches in the contents of pdf files can only work if the pdf files are actually searchable. Please note: in some cases it requires a reboot for the changes to work. If there’s another value, change it to the abovementioned value and close the registry editor. exe file name & path which is conflicting with. If you find this also for your pdf files, go in your registry editor and navigate to the value Windows explorer has stopped working mostly occurs due to a software. If you notice that your Windows search in file contents does not work with pdf files as well, you can repeat the same steps from above in the advanced indexing options, but then you need to scroll down to the pdf file type to check whether the “Registered IFilter is not found” setting is there. That should fix your file searches for content in text files. I have illustrated this in the image below, where you see a newly created, empty workfolder on drive c: Suppose you have created a folder named “Workfolder” on your harddrive. Let’s consider a Windows 7 computer for this first case. In order to explain it best, let me work with a few examples here. I will show you how to fix both situations.

On top of that, it also seems that in certain circumstances, the search functionality gets broken, so that searches for text strings inside files will not produce any search results, even if you know that there are files which do contain that text string. It seems to be the case that Microsoft changed the default behavior of the search functionality so that it actually becomes less useful. Windows Search in File Contents Not Working – The Issuesįirst, let me talk about the problem(s) that people seem to be experiencing. Update Windows 10: speaking of newer versions of Windows, I've written an updated article about searching in file contents with Windows 10 here. So why did Microsoft decide to make Windows search worse? One would think that with the arrival of newer versions of the operating system, things would generally improve.

Windows 8 file explorer not responding