I keep hearing that the latest and greatest wave in technology for the home PC is the ability to have more powerful file and data search tools to help you find grandma’s picture which got stored in some oddball directory last year.

I would use these in an instant, except for two concerns.

  1. Google Desktop Search. My recent feelings of animosity towards Google aside, the concept of a Web-based local search is so backwards. And then you spook us by injecting local results into Web seraches? That app got round-filed in less than an hour.
  2. CPU and Disk Thrashing. Some of the other search tools that I have tried thrash my hard drive and lock-up my teeny PIII/500Mhz Thinkpad 600X. Not everyone has a monster machine with a GB of RAM. I demand Auto-Indexing of all new content, so I am not taking advantage of the gentility that these processes can bring. But I also demand instantaneous results. So either the desktop search companies can by me a new machine, or clean up their indexing.