Peter's Blog

Taking over someone else's pc I decided to install Google Desktop Search again as a new version had just come out. It still has some of the problems I had with it last time, mainly that by showing the results in a web browser you are pretty limited in your options: you can open it, you can open the folder it is in but if you right click you don't get a comprehensive context menu as in windows explorer (or Microsoft's Desktop Search). What I miss here is the choice of editing python scripts or running them.

The google thing does have a new sidebar to display rss feeds and stuff on your desktop all the time but I'm not sure I really need that kind of thing always there at a glance. When my boss buys me a 22" widescreen monitor I'll reserve the right 2" for google.

I installed it on my own work pc but after a while it annoyed me again: if I leave the pc long enough gds seems to gobble up all available memory, pushing everything else out to swap. I then have to wait a couple of minutes for everything to get swapped back in. The other pc I was using had win2k and 512Megs of ram, mine has Windows XP in 256M and swaps a lot anyway.

I tried blinkx as the 'smart folders' feature looked a bit like thunderbird stored searches for files instead of email messages. However, I was disapointed that the folder view again only gave the 'open' option, no context menu. Apart from this the interface was kinda annoying, tiny fonts, didn't index source code, mixed search results with obscure web search results from blogs, couldn't index thunderbird (as gds can), I uninstalled it in less than half an hour.

Maybe the latest Microsoft search thing will shutdown with windows without hanging? If there is an extension for it to handle thunderbird I might go back to that.