Desktop Search in XP

[bhurley]

I've tried Google Desktop Search, X1 (offered by Yahoo), and Windows Desktop Search, and found each of them lacking.

Google Desktop was great at first, but eventually got corrupted and crashed my machine repeatedly. Plus whenever I archived Outlook files it would lose track of them even when re-indexing, so I could never just click on an indexed email to open it; I'd have to open the archive file and find the original. So I gave up and switched to X1.

X1 was excellent, speedy and comprehensive, but it had one major flaw: whenever my computer would go to sleep, X1 would crash. I stuck it out through several updates but this bug never seemed to get fixed.

I currently use Windows Desktop Search, but it seems to be slow and incomplete. I know there's stuff on my machine that's not getting picked up in the index.

I have about 25 gigs of Outlook archives that need to be in my search index (I seem to be the only one in my company who keeps Outlook archives, so my colleagues rely on me to retrieve old emails from 6 or 7 years ago that everyone else has long since deleted).

Does anyone have a desktop search program that they're happy with and that doesn't have all these bugs? Has X1 solved the "crash on sleep" problem?

[beGi]

I'm using X1 with no problem and I really like it and all the options, you can also try Copernic Desktop Search or Ava Find, they are OK, but i still prefer X1....

[mgo]

I currently use Windows Desktop Search, but it seems to be slow and incomplete. I know there's stuff on my machine that's not getting picked up in the index.

I have about 25 gigs of Outlook archives that need to be in my search index (I seem to be the only one in my company who keeps Outlook archives, so my colleagues rely on me to retrieve old emails from 6 or 7 years ago that everyone else has long since deleted).

Does anyone have a desktop search program that they're happy with

I am just a "casual" Outlook user, a few appointments & things but not as an email client. But, doesn't Outlook have its own search capability?

The XP version of their Desktop Search is OK, but often one has to go in and click the stupid little search doggie icon and search the "old way".

Make sure you have the very latest Windows update of Search for best results.

From what I have read, having a 25 gig Outlook .PST file can be a quick track to disaster, so make sure you have a backup of that on another, separate media, before something icky happens to it. Jerry Pournelle has written extensively about big Outlook .PST files on his "Chaos Manor" site.

[jdhurst]

The Windows Desktop Search (newest version or the one immediately prior) works fairly well. Go into the settings and tell it what and where to index and it will find things in the index (including Outlook files) very quickly.

The downside is it cannot find all file contents, and has been already pointed out here, you need to use the Companion search for that.

Taken the two things together, Windows Search is working fine for me. Unfortunately, Companion Search is not available in Vista, and so my Vista machine cannot find lots of stuff - sad commentary on Microsoft's idiocy of late. ... JDH

[bhurley]

Thanks for the comments.

To clarify, I have about 15 Outlook files that together add up to 25 gigs, not just one 25 gig pst file! I try not to let my pst files get very large.

And yes, I'm using the latest version of Windows Desktop Search for XP. It was working okay for a while, but seems quite slow now, probably because of my Outlook files. I like the literally instant results I got with X1 and Google Desktop. The slowness seems related to the size of the index file, which makes intuitive sense, but I had many many gigs worth of index in X1 and it always moved lickety-split.

The built-in search function in Outlook is a joke; it's better in Outlook 2007 because it uses Windows Desktop Search. The search function in previous versions of Outlook took forever and used an extraordinarily awkward interface. Generally I want to search everything at once, not differentiating between Outlook files and other files on my computer; when I'm looking for a particular word or text string, I'd like to see it wherever it comes up. Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, and X1 all do that reasonably well.

Sounds like I should try X1 again, since I was happiest with that. It never worked properly on my ThinkPad due to the sleep issue, but maybe it'll work on the machine I use now (a ThinkCentre A61e).

[loyukfai]

Tried a few options back then... Maybe 1-year ago... Google won hands down in handling non-English encodings... And that it also provides a sidebar makes it still the desktop choice for XP for me...

The interface leaves something to be desired through...