Before the capacity of computer hard disks became as large as it is today, most of us stashed our old record collections, photo prints from past holidays, bank statements and letters in lofts, cardboard boxes and garden sheds.

As a storage strategy it wasn't the most efficient in terms of either space or time and locating what you were looking for could often be a challenge.

The digital era has allowed us to reclaim storage space around the house and store pictures, music files and any number of documents on our home PCs, but keeping tabs on all these items can be just as frustrating as rummaging through dusty boxes in the attic.

As a computer's hard disk starts to fill up with photos, music files, video clips and other files, some kind of order needs to be imposed to ensure that you can quickly find what you need in the future.

One approach would be to spend your evenings systematically working through every folder on your PC, cataloguing files and emails as you go. This would be very dull but there are plenty of free tools to do the hard work for you.

In this feature, we look at some of the software that can help you organise and find digital photos, music files, emails and other important information stored on your PC's hard disk.

The basic approach
When it comes to looking for a particular file, the basic search tool built into Windows will be the first port of call for most people. If you haven't used this before, simply right-click on the Start menu and select Search. You can search for a specific file name or any part of it you can remember, or look for text within a file, which is useful if you can't remember the actual file name but can recall some of its content.

You can further refine your search according to when the file was last amended, its size (a music file will generally be much larger than a Word document) and type.

While the Windows search tool may be relatively easy to use, it's not that effective. A new wave of free search tools let you pull together related information from different sources such as documents, images, emails or recently viewed web pages. Some allow you to define the way you search, so you can hunt down files saved on a certain date if you can't remember the file name, for example.

Desktop searching
There are a number of free Desktop search programs that can help organise files and find information related to a specific keyword from a range of sources such as email messages, documents and multimedia files and old instant messaging conversations.

Copernic, Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own Desktop search software and, while some are currently only available as beta versions, they all offer a comprehensive variety of search and indexing facilities.

The Windows search tool fails to return results from email messages and websites but programs such as Copernic offer this facility. The program is very straightforward, with toolbar buttons that let you search emails, pictures, videos, contacts or visited websites to find what you are looking for.

Within these categories, you can perform a search based on keywords. Results are displayed in a list - click on an item to view its contents in the preview pane just below this, which will save you opening and shutting down files repeatedly. This previewing facility is also offered by Yahoo's Desktop search tool.

The Google Desktop program lists search results in a similar way to the online search engine and breaks results down by medium, showing how many related emails, files, web pages and instant message chats it has found.

You can click on any of these to view only the results found in this medium or opt to view all results at once or refine your search by selecting the Desktop Preferences option and ticking the boxes of the items you want to include in your search.

Specialised searching
All the Desktop search programs we've looked at here let you search across all source types or choose to search in a single source category only. You may, for example, be searching for a discussion you had with someone on a particular subject. If you know this was definitely an email exchange rather than an instant messaging conversation, you can opt to search only emails.

Each program does this slightly differently but if you're using Copernic, for example, you can select the Other Search Results option on the left-hand side of the screen to view results from other source categories.

On first impressions, Yahoo's Desktop Search program looks quite confusing. Despite featuring an assortment of toolbar buttons for emails, attachments, contacts, files and other source types, each category displays an entire list of results in that category until you begin to enter search criteria and narrow down the search.

So if you're searching for a file, clicking on the File toolbar button will display a list of all the files on your PC. You can then enter search details, such as a file name or type, the date it was last modified, its size and so on and the program will then start to filter results accordingly.

All these programs are easy to download and install and are all free. However, while installation usually takes just a few minutes, actually setting up the program takes much longer. This is because once you have installed the software it has to scan your PC's hard disk to index its contents to be able to help you find what you are looking for in the future.

In Google's Desktop search program, the progress of the indexing process is shown on screen along with the estimated time remaining. Other programs such as Copernic simplify the process so you can start using it immediately and won't index some categories until you choose to.

It's worth bearing in mind that by default some programs only index music or photos stored in the My Music and My Pictures folders. This can easily be changed and there should be a full explanation of how to do so in the software's Help section.

The most disappointing Desktop Search program has got to be MSN's. While it's linked to Outlook and Outlook Express for emails and contacts, the program doesn't offer any previews (only thumbnails for images). It's an improvement over the Windows Search tool but the alternatives from Copernic, Google and Yahoo offer more useful Desktop-related features.

Sort your snaps
One of the biggest culprits of a cluttered hard disk is the digital photo and if you own a digital camera you may have lots of digital images on your hard disk already. Most of us will have uploaded photos at some point without getting round to changing file names from the default codes assigned by the camera.

No matter how thorough they are, Desktop search tools are only as good as the information they have to work with and aren't sophisticated enough to determine the content of a photo so it's important that you tag files properly if you are to get the most from such software.

Adobe's Photoshop Album Starter Edition is free to download. It allocates tags to photographs, which can be used to assign images to a category (such as Christmas 2002, for example) and thus help with future searches.

You can use the Calendar view for finding images by date and use the software to transfer photos directly from a digital camera. However, the free version only organises 250 images.

Google's Picasa sorts photos based on when they were taken. Providing the date on your digital camera is correct, you can easily find holiday snaps, wedding photos and other date-related pictures. A timeline provides an animated and chronological view of the photos, which is easy to navigate.

For those who own it, Microsoft Office 2003 features its own photo-archiving tool - the Microsoft Clip Organizer - that can quickly scan your hard disk for photos. It lists images according to location and shows them as thumbnails in a Windows Explorer-style layout.

Keywords can be entered for each image to help with sorting and future searches - just right-click on an image and choose Edit Keywords. In the dialogue box that appears enter a relevant keyword or phrase ('Katie - Madrid New Year's Eve 2004', for example) and click on OK.