| Increase Productivity with Google Desktop |  |
Increase Productivity with Google Desktop
Recently the Klixo team downloaded Xobni, a great email analytics tool that gives you interesting stats on your email usage. The Xobni buzz has been and gone now, but the feature that endured for me was the search function. You can literally search every email you have ever sent or received in seconds, and that is very valuable to workplace productivity.
Many people file every email they receive in a collection of folders, categorised in a way that make sense to them. This is a natural, very human way of sorting large amounts of information (in this case, emails) but is not great for productivity. It is actually a more productive if you just file all of your emails in one of three folders (the trusted trio) and rely on a good search engine to find emails when you need to.
So after using Xobni for a while I was interested in finding a lightweight tool that could search all of my email, but without the bloat of the other cool features which were nice to have once in a while, but that I could live without. I also have a pretty old and slow laptop, and I don't have much RAM. Xobni often consumed more than 32MB which is a lot to spare on my poor old HP/Compaq nx6120.
So I installed and tested the latest version of Google Desktop, which is a "desktop" search engine; it searches the files and emails on your own PC. When Google Desktop first came out it was a bit of a dog in my opinion because it used so much resources (RAM & CPU) that I couldn't run it without it slowing down my PC. I was pleasantly surprised now (a few years later) to download version 5.8, which is a much slimmer offering, and I read that the developers at Google have put great effort into this version to keep it lightweight.
One trick to reducing RAM is to not activate the "Sidebar with gadgets" that allows you to run Google Gadgets in a sidebar (like Vista). It is an awesome feature, but resource hungry.
On my laptop GoogleDesktop.exe usually runs at about 8MB, which I can handle, and only consumes more RAM when it is doing something really important, like indexing or sorting results.
As well as indexing all important emails, Google Desktop also indexes most other documents on your PC, but not code files (by default) so you will have to install a plug-in for that. Once installed, you just tap the CTRL key twice at any time to popup a search box. Once you get in to the habit you will find your self double-tapping CTRL to open files, instead of using Windows Explorer, it is that quick.
Just a word of warning for first time installers, indexing your email and files can take many hours (mine indexed over two nights) so you may have a long wait until you can start reaping the benefits.
So in summary, if you use your PC for work, get a good desktop search engine so that you don't have to spend time trawling through email folders and windows explorer. There are some tricks to getting it working smoothly, so I have listed my suggestions below.
If you have any more tips, comment this!
Setup hints
- Don't run the Sidebar with gadgets (set "Display Mode" to None)
- If you are a developer, install Larry's Any Text File Indexer plugin so that your code files are indexed
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