grepping in windows

is there some sort of easy way (i.e. not installing cygwin) to get grep like functionality in windows? all i want is something that does grep -i something blah.txt. normal searching is not good because it takes far too long

As far as I know, you will need to install something. My suggestion:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
^ dl and unzip that somewhere; click on 'my computer'->system-enviromental variables and add $INSTALLPATH\bin:$INSTALLPATH;usr\local\wbin to your path (eg, if you unzipped it to d:\winnix, you'd add "d:\winnix\bin;d:\winnix\usr\local\wbin").

That will give you grep (and unrar, and zsh), and it only takes up a little bit of space.