I've been pretty happy with Google Desktop - pretty speedy results, and doesn't seem detrimental to "normal" performance.

But I've noticed that a recent update has taken away its ability to index an external drive (NOT Flash, a regular drive). I've totally uninstalled and reinstalled, I've added the drive, removed the drive, added the drive, rinsed, repeated.

I receive a "Unknown error accessing files during crawling" at best, when I get ANY type of response on the Preferences page.

I can't find a solution, so I'm thinking time to find an alternative. Also, I'm not digging that on WINDOWS 7, to RUN GD effectively, I need to turn off Windows indexing, which screws up my Outlook search (which is superior to GD, but only when searching Outlook).that depends on your OS vista and 7 have windows side baryou might also try some of these http://alternativeto.net/software/google-desktop/http://tech-informer.com/bye-bye-google-desktopit-was-fun-while-it-lasted-24/

The reason I've never used Google desktop search, personally, is that it doesn't index file names, only their content. Most of my searches comprise of trying to find a file or a specific set of files, or something. I don't generally need to search by content; and, EVEN if I did, Windows comes with that capability anyway.

Really, the only time I use a "search" would be in the windows 7 (and before that windows Vista) start MENU search bar. If I can't find it that way, I generally open the Search tool I wrote to find it. (which also presents the files in the way I prefer, unlike the search results in Windows Explorer)

Also: Windows Search can be told to index external drives; right-click the drive, choose properties, and check off "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties".

Quote from: phoop007 on June 30, 2011, 11:41:05 AM

that depends on your OS vista and 7 have windows side bar