Have you ever lost a file that you were sure was on your system? EF Find is a powerful search program for Windows that can search for not only lost files but also text, HEX sequences and regular expressions inside archives.

This is a great tool for those of you that want a certain document but simply can't remember the name of the file. So if you've written a document about networks but just gave the document a generic name, you can search for 'networks' in EF Find, and even if it's in a compressed file, it will find it. The range of files it can search is really impressive and extends to 7-Zip, ACE, ARC, ARJ, BZIP2, CAB, CPIO, GZIP, IMG, ISO (ISO9660), LHA, RAR, RPM, SFX, SQX, TAR, TBZ, TGZ, ZIP and ZOO files.

The interface is a simple GUI with the search bar at the top. You can also filter searches in various ways including to make it case sensitive and within certain folders. This program has proved so popular that it's now been translated into 23 languages which gives some measure of how useful it is. The only downside is that it can't search within documents that aren't compressed so as long as you've got lots of zipped-up files, you'll love this.