Vista - search tool bar please help!

I'm a
teacher who has just replaced my school vaio with vista vgn-bx41xn to a private
vgn-cr42. I have followed advice to replace the help / support in the start menu with search as apparantly it has gone
due to the SP1 changes. It worked however the search tool bar that it gives me
is not the one I used to have, in fact it only gives me a thin Google based
search which only brings up a fraction of what I know I have on the computer.
What I'm trying to say - badly I know is that I have transferred all of my
teaching materials onto my new computer and I want to be able to search the
whole computer using the search toolbar but it doesn't look like the old vista
search I did which gives you the name of the file, date modifies, type, folder
etc also within this search you can modify it to only search for docs, or video
etc. Now I do know that I can still do this on my new computer however I have
had to collate all of resources onto one file called sarah I now have to go
directly into this file on my desktop then in the top right hand area I can
carry out the search that I am used to carrying out on my old vaio. The search
everywhere one is useless as I have already said even though I have gone through
the process of replacing it onto the start menu it just doesn't open up in the
way the old one did. I hope this makes some sense as I would like to know that
that I don't have to put everything into this one file forever. I hope someone reads this that will be able to help!!