Improve Your Productivity with a Desktop Search Program

I'm no fan of Windows Vista, but it does have one killer feature that's almost worth the price of admission: built-in desktop search. Click the Start button (or hit the Windows key on your keyboard), then start typing: Vista produces instant search results from your documents, e-mail messages, Internet favorites, and the like. Once you use this a few times, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Fortunately, you don't need Vista to enjoy this kind of lightning-fast search. Several programs offer similar functionality, and they're all free:

• Ask.com Desktop Search I haven't tried this one, but it has a couple features that look interesting. For example, it lets you search from within any application -- great for those times when you go to open a file and can't remember where on your hard drive it's stored.
• Copernic Desktop Search My search tool of choice for the past couple years, Copernic makes easy work of finding (and previewing) documents, e-mail, contacts, etc. It also includes a "deskbar" so you can run searches at any time, without having to open the program.
• Google Desktop Wouldn't it be awesome to harness the power of Google for desktop searches? You can, but truth be told, I'm not a fan. The text-heavy search results look messy, and there's no dedicated preview window as with Copernic. Plus, Google Desktop comes paired with Sidebar, a resource-hogging gadget tool that not everybody wants.
• Windows Desktop Search A decent desktop-search tool by most accounts, but you'll want to check out some of the user reviews at CNET's Download.com -- several users have reported sluggish system performance after installing WDS and subsequent difficulties uninstalling it.