14 DAY TRIAL // Regardless of how organized your files are on the computer, a search tool will always help you find a document faster. There are plenty of third-party tools to achieve this and even Windows integrated an indexing option in Vista for faster finds. But if we're talking about searching in a network, things get a tad complicated. Not too much, as Vista always provides the means to look for files in a network, but it is slightly more difficult.
LAN Search Pro is a portable instrument designed, as its name suggests, to give you a hand in searching for files in a computer network. Despite the “Pro” appendage to the name the software is a freebie and on top of this it needs no installation and can be run from removable drives.
When launching the software a simple interface ready to get down to action welcomes you. The largest part is reserved to search results while the upper part is dedicated to the button bar, which features functions for clearing the results, saving them to a DAT file, loading them, exporting to CSV, XML or HTML, finding the desired item in the result list, mapping and unmapping drives, scoping (choosing only a part of the network), direct access to the Options panel and password management for the areas with restricted access. All of them can be found in the menu bar and most of them benefit from hotkeys.
No special skills are required to work with LAN Search Pro and you can simply go on and type in the search query and then wait for the results to be displayed (which, by the way, will take a little longer than expected because the application has to parse all the files as it does not come with a file indexing service). But if accuracy is what you want, then additional settings have to be made. You can start with selecting the search scope and choosing the networks you want to be scoured for the files you're looking for.
When returning the results you are not given any estimation for the job completion, but instead the application provides the current status of the task and the number of active threads. Sure this is no estimation and waiting to finish or stopping the process are the only alternatives available. Once the search is complete an information window pops up notifying you of the number of files found.
As mentioned before, LAN Search Pro features a built-in look-up tool you can use to pinpoint the desired item in the result list. If hotkeys are more to your liking, Ctrl+F calls the specific function in no time. All results benefit from complete location path, size as well as date and time of creation.
For more specific results the program sports quite a bag of options consisting in filters (size and date), network locations, enabling search in hidden folders or FTP location. Moreover, you can enable a set of directories that can be excluded from the search or restrict the file hunt down only to specific folders. All these options are to be negotiated with in the Options panel.
A very useful feature in LAN Search Pro is the ability to look inside text files. In the configuration screen, under the Main tab you will find in the lower part the miscellaneous section, which lets you enable text searching. With this option active in the main application window besides the regular file name search box there will also be another one where you can put some text in order to make the results more accurate. Combined with date and size filters text search turns into a powerful feature.
Drive mapping is not a function that will come in useful when using the program as it will actually invoke Windows' Map Network Drive and your choice will be available in Windows Explorer as well as other file manager installed on the system. Other than this there is no other use for this option.
If you have a particular set of options you want to keep and don't want to make the choices for each search, LAN Search Pro makes available an easy way for this. Profiles with the settings can be saved to any location you want and loaded whenever needed. You can save as many profiles as you want for whatever type of search you want.
To make every search as flexible as possible, the developer of the software added support for wildcards. The same rules as for MS-DOS and Windows apply in this case and several wildcards can be used as long as they are separated by semicolons.
LAN Search Pro proved to be a reliable network search tool, easy to use and efficient in its endeavors. For such a small program the list of options is impressive and in some cases even exceeded expectations.
The Good
Profiles can be created in order to avoid making the same settings over and over again. From the result list you can open the files, copy, move them, open the folder they are located in as well as creating a shortcut on the desktop.
The Bad
The Truth
If there are flaws in the application it does a fine job hiding them as our testing went smooth, with no hiccups.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
