Have you ever lost a file on your own computer? Or have you even forgotten that you wrote something in the past that would be useful for a current project? Try Google Desktop. It’s an amazing tool that you use to “google” your own computer.
Go to Google and download the latest version of Google Desktop. It will take just a few minutes to download it to your computer and run the install process. Then you will have to reboot your computer. After that, the Google Desktop will take several hours to index all the files on your computer. It will create an index of the words in your Word documents, Emails, Excel sheets, Powerpoint Presentations, PDF files, HTML pages and other data files. This indexing process will go on whenever your computer is idle. After the initial index setup you won’t notice that this is happening.
The latest Google Desktop has several options – you can choose to have a sidebar with various “widgets” to display things like the weather, special links, photos, maps, news and a wide variety of other things to select from. You can choose to have a small deskbar that lets you search your computer from the taskbar at the bottom of your browser, or have a larger floating deskbar. There are also short cuts such as hitting CTRL key 2 times to bring up a quick text search box which is handy when you are using other applications. A small search box also will appear on your OUTLOOK that searched your emails much faster than the Outlook search function.
I have found Google Desktop to be a real time saver. I have used it on both IE 6 and IE 7 on a PC notebook.