Category: Windows

http://www.freewebs.com/onenote/

Don’t know much about it other than its a godsend for firefox users.

If you are using this plugin to keep track of your browsing history in the Opera 9 pre-release you’ll need to change a registry key to point to the location where 9TP2 stores its profile (slightly different to the default)

Its mentioned in the release notes and readme but it doesnt tell you where the key is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareOpera History Component

There are two values in this tree you have to change

BookmarksLocation:

set to your documents and settings folderyour usernameApplication DataOperaopera9TP2 (yours may vary)profileopera6.adr

HistoryLocation: set to

your documents and settings folderyour usernameApplication DataOperaopera9TP2 (yours may vary)profileglobal.dat

Previously I’ve been tossing up between a few desktop search tools. Google’s Desktop Search sidebar and rss collection features kept me on it for a long time. Unfortunately, the performance hit on the system was too much for my liking. Using Systernals Filemon tool, I found it would constantly make reads from the disk. Sometimes it would begin indexing even though I was still using my machine. It would also take about half a minute to stop indexing when I returned to my machine, and due to the constant hard disk access, would make it difficult to start new apps or switch between running ones while the indexing was finishing up.

I had been using Copernic at work and found it a reasonable alternative. It boasts speed of response and returns the ‘dont index while on batteries’ feature that I missed when I switched from MSN Desktop Search. It can’t be extended through plugins in the same way GDS or even MSN can, but its fast. I’m not too certain if Copernic has picked up, every email, or every reference in each document, the GDS results seemed a little more relevant, in the order of 0.01%, but because of the speed and responsiveness returned to my system, as well as the free disk space (smaller index files) it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Though this critique could be down to the UI of Copernic, it’s a windows application, again fast, but I’m still used to GDS (again, this used-to ness will probably fade as I use Copernic more.)

Realising that desktop search tools allow you to specify what files you want to index, I simply installed Copernic on my laptop, alongside GDS. I disabled most of GDS filetypes such that it would only index Web History. I got Copernic to do everything else (even index Onenote’s .one files as text files) except index the history from Firefox and IE. I then deleted the index file using TweakGDS which freed a couple gig of HD and let copernic take over.

Best of all, my system runs better than when I had GDS alone. Copernic satisfies my desktop search needs, and I’ve got the excellent sidebar and web clips tool that google provides – and its still picking up rss feeds and popping them up from new sites I visit, as it always has.

Process Lasso is a diarrhaetic for windows processes that hog the cpu and block the responsiveness of your machine.

With the out of the box settings it makes the system more user friendly so whilst one process is falling on its arse, the next can continue without problem.

Edit: I’ve since uninstalled Process Lasso, it was interfering with a few other apps but whilst it would recover usability to my machine when in dire straights – it would also reduce the priority of important foreground processes when I needed them running at regular priority. I’m sure that if you were persistant, you could tweak the settings and the thresholds before lassoing comes into practice, but rather than do all that, I decided to investigate the source of the problem (being GDS accessing the hard disk too often and do something about it.

Less MSI�rables: A tool to Extract the contents of an .msi File

Trying to make room for my ever growing google index, I wondered when the growing would end.

According to this
Google Desktop Help Center question, Google needs a 1GB minimum and will keep going till it reaches 4GB.

Currently my index is at 2.2GB and its time to evaluate whether or not I want to free up the extra room. The sidebar (and all the config I’ve done on it to date) along with GDS’ plugin nature is difficult to part with. Do I just make the extra room or try something else?

I’ve used MSN Desktop Search and its support for filetypes was impressive (one note and visual studio out of the box). The customiseable search bar commands were useful too. I believe I uninstalled due to speed concerns – a tiny bit more resource hungry & loading up IE each time to bring up the results took a bit longer than loading Firefox to do the same in Google Desktop Search.

So I see my options as follows

• Drop my web-history and everything collected to date (only a measely 330,000 which for 2GB of storage isn’t really too hot), uninstall Google Desktop and find something else.
• Make the extra room for GDS, suffer without being able to keep some more mp3’s on the laptop and other static files locally.

That something else will have its own clinks and issues. A quick summary of the options is here

Copernic Desktop Search – claims to be faster, lighter on the hard drive and less resource hungry. It probably benefits from the experience and length the product has been around for. I’m not too sure about file support for one note, but it does support plugins, a ‘while on batteries’ mode and you can elect to have non-standard files indexed simply as text.

Blinkx I know for their video search, but I also found they do a desktop search. This I would expect would have some good stuff for indexing multimedia ahead of text documents which a quick look at their website reveals is true. They seem to offer not much flexibility in file types – you can have any colour as long as its black type thing.

Copernic seems to get the best reviews and is looking the goods. I’ve just updated to the latest version of GDS (did that the last time I was considering giving them the flick) so I will rebuild the index and if things still get bloated, then I’ll know where to turn.

Other paid products exist: X1, dtSearch (with Linux support) but for what I’ve seen, I think the free versions do give these guys a good enough run for their money.