Windows comes with an inbuilt file searching feature using which you can find any file located on your hard drive. This file searching feature is pretty good and is able to locate all the files that you every stored on your local storage media. But if you want to have a portable search tool of your own with its own database of files on all of your local and removable storage media, then maybe you will love Locate32. It is a small portable file searching tool that can search for any file or files on your local storage media within a fraction of a second.
Locate32 is portable and is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. It supports Windows versions from Windows 98 to Windows 10. It makes use of a small database of all of your files which makes searching of files very quick fast. In fact, the first thing that you have to do after launching Locate32 is to update its databases. You can do this by selecting File → Update Databases or by pressing F9. This will make it scan your local storage media and add all the files to its database.
This new database creation might take many minutes. Once the database creation is finished, anymore updates to the database are much faster. Now you can search for any file and it will fetch the file for you in less than a second. You can use wildcards for searching files as usual. You can refine the search by adding file dates limitation and more advanced parameters. The file search results can be exported to HTML or TXT files.
In the settings for Locate32, you can change the location of the files database file and can also modify which partitions or folders should be included in it. You can change the rules for searching the files, you can schedule the database updates so that it always contains latest files, and you can also assign keyboard shortcuts for various operations.
Locate32 is a small, portable, fast and efficient file searching utility for Windows. It can be copied to your USB pendrives so that you can carry it anywhere and use on any PC. Since it uses a file database to search for the files, you can search for the files on any hard drive once the database has been created even if you do not have physical access to that drive later.
You can download Locate32 file searching utility from https://locate32.cogit.net/.