I understand Office 2007, and in particular Outlook maintains a continuous index and is blinding when it comes to finding stuff. I’ve got Windows Desktop Search (WDS) installed on my work laptop and I find it excellent. I’m having fun lately marking the “utility” as I call it of various computer systems. This one has a 4 out of 5 rating.

I’ve also installed Adobe Reader 8 for the iFilter it gives me, and once I’d turned on the extension I can index into the internals of pdf files.

The only recent downside I hit was down to the joys of VPN. I haven’t been in the office for several weeks, and therefore I’m doing the ever so risky maneuver of archiving my outlook over the VPN. This normally works ok, I kick it off at home while watching telly and let it chug away in the background. It was particularly slow tonight, and of course there it was – WDS had noticed the archive file joining outlook and was diving in to index it. I wouldn’t mind if I was on a LAN, but over VPN it was plain annoying.

So into WDS config and unchecked the archive file.