I may be the last person on earth to have figured this out, but if you are not aware of the following it might save you some time.

First, I am running Win2000, but the Windows Explorer search function in other Operating Systems is similar. Second, I have multiple disk-drives and multiple partitions on each drive - which is where this really comes in handy.

In the drop-down pick-list to specify where the search function should look (the "Look in" field) are several "canned" choices... each individual drive, plus the combination of all local drives. What I did not realize is that you can blank out this field and type in whatever you want. For instance, when I need to search to see if I have already downloaded an image file, I know it is a waste of time to search my paging disk and my system/software backup disks. But, sometimes I use the "all local drives" just to do a "one-step" and not have to do multiple searches. This, of course, takes a lot of time and drives my disks crazy. Now, in the "look in" field I use something like the following...

c:\images;d:\images;x:\;y:newvol\images
(any combination I want, separated by semi-colons)

This causes the search function to perform a "one-step" search limited to just the drives, folders and sub-folders I have specified. (It also searches all sub-folders under the ones listed if that option is checked) This saves a tremendous amount of time searching places I KNOW the file I am looking for will not be found.

To make this even more "slick" I have created a "text" file, using Notepad, which contains a single line for each of my most frequent searches.

c:\images;d:\images
c:\images;d:\images;x:\
c:\images;d:\images;x:\;y:newvol\images
y:\backups
and so on...

I put a shortcut to this file on my desktop so I can just double-click it to open it up. Then, I high-lite and copy the particular argument (line) I want to use at the time, and I paste that argument into the "look in" field of the search function. No more time wasted looking in places the file won't be, and no more multiple-step searches to find a single file.

<img src="http://forums.techguy.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=570303">

I hope this little tip helps at least one person.