Searching Network Drives?

Still trying to figure out Vista as my work computer was recently upgraded from XP. In XP if I wanted to search a network drive for a file or folder with a partial known name, I'd use the search tool and it returned results fairly quickly. In Vista, the network admins have indexing disabled for the network because they don't want hundreds of computers constantly scanning for changes. Which is fine, but now when I want to find a file, I *think* this thing is scanning through every file, *name and contents* for my search term, which makes it far, far slower. In fact, in the time it took me to search this newsgroup, read about 10 posts, and then open this window to type my query, Explorer has still not located the document I want. (I know it exists because I was just looking at it from a coworker's screen.). I *could* just ask him what the path is, but that wouldn't be "teaching a man to fish" as it were.