I’ve been a fan of Google Desktop Search (GDS) for a long time, except recently I’ve been having a Very Hard Time ™ with it.  My problems really started when I upgraded to Office 2007, when my entire desktop would just c-r-a-a-a-a-w-w-w-w-w-l, all day long.  Outlook was taking up most of the CPU.  It was a nightmare.  Like the dream when you wake up in your bed, and you look next to you and there’s a horse head there in the bed with you, but instead of being a Godfather horse, it’s a cartoon horse, you know, Ookla’s horse, from Thundarr the Barbarian.

(shudder)

Anyway, GDS keeps indexing my computer and it does a great job on everything but email.  It doesn’t scan my PST (personal storage) files from Outlook, and the only tips on the GDS forums are to “disable cached exchange mode”.  For those of you who don’t know, cached exchange mode ROCKS, except for the nasty part about not being compatible with Google Desktop Search.

A friend of mine then recommends that I make Windows Desktop Search (aka Instant Search in Office 2007) do the indexing of my email, and let Google take care of everything else on the PC.  Seemed to be a good idea, in theory, but after letting it all calm down (turning GDS off of email, rebuilding index, switching off of cached exchange mode, installing windows desktop search, rebuilding OST file, etc), it’s still a heaping pile of crud on my computer. 

So then I realize, hey… this Windows Desktop Search isn’t that easy to remove.  GDS at least lets you remove the index files if needed, and it’s very easy to remove.  So I go searching for how to safely remove it, and it seems others have had the same problem:

Heh, DarthVista’s comment gets me every time.  (sniff).  And YES, it *is* worth my time. 

Now I’m back to the drawing board in general – I already tried turning off cached exchange mode and using GDS – it was faster, but only when I’m connected to the network, and I *frequently* need to do email work when I’m not online, so that’s just not an option.  I wish Google would just fix it already.  I’m going to try to uninstall Windows Desktop Search and just do without GDS indexing of email for the time being.  It’s just too painful being on a dual-core 1.8Ghz laptop that’s way too slow.  I already use premium desktop firewall and antivirus, which slows things down enough.