My [insert desktop search engine] killed my computer!
Knowledge workers use them. Managers love them. System administrators abhor the m. What are they?
They are desktop search engines (DSE). There is a growing market of DSE’s available from such powerhouses as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to DSE specialists like X1. It is a noble goal! Allow the knowledge worker to easily find information from the myriad of documents formats used on local and networked resources.
Unfortunately reality sets in over and over again. Desktop search kills machines. I just finished removing the Windows Live search component from one of my coworkers workstation. Her machine had recently began taking an inexplicable amount of time to boot up, approximately 15 minutes. Unbelievable! After some research I found the newly installed Windows Live Search…..ugh!
This is not the first time, nor the first DSE that has caused similar issues. I have tried DSE’s from Google and X1 in the past with similar results.
So what’s the deal? I know that the indexing process must be incredibly complex but the developers of these utilities must learn that it is crippling machines, even some of the newest ones available! C’mon guys, this is a great idea and people do need this type of functionality but not at the expense of their normal productivity.
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February 12, 2007 -
Posted by palehorse |
Development, Internet, Operating Systems, Windows
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I’ve been using Google’s for a while now and it seems a little lighter than X1′s or Microsoft’s. I still have to shut it off when Visual Studio starts eating up memory.
I must admit that out of the ones I have tried, Google was the best performing. I also had to admit that the open API plug-in architecture was nice. It was still just too much for me to keep however. The need to shut it down when Visual Studio is hogging resources is a good example of the reasoning.