Easily find any document on your computer or network

Tools like Google Desktop are extremely useful when looking for things that you’ve lost on your PC.

But what happens when you need to find items both on your PC and on networked drives including e-mail messages, calendar appointments and documents? Microsoft Windows Desktop Search attempts to bridge this gap by providing a fast and efficient search tool across network drives. The bottom line is that it doesn’t do a bad job although as usual with Microsoft products, you can’t help feeling there’s much room for improvement.

One installed, in classic Microsoft style, you have to restart your computer. The first thing you’ll notice is that it installs search boxes absolutely everywhere – from a toolbar in Internet Explorer to the taskbar, Outlook client and just about any other Microsoft product. There’s even a floating search bar which you can place on your desktop for use at any time.

Searches on your PC are nowhere near as fast as with Google Desktop but it does a decent job of searching for appointments in Outlook and files on external drives although external searches do take a notably longer time.

Microsoft Windows Desktop Search offers a useful solution to anyone looking to search across networks and especially Outlook related tasks although as far as desktop searches go, I’ll be sticking with Google.