Turned off Google Desktop...

I've been pretty happy with Google Desktop since I first installed it. I even upgraded to v2 a while back. I turned off all the annoying toolbar stuff, but overall it's been OK. I liked the way it could quickly find an email from the thousands I keep on my laptop.

However, recently I noticed that my performance wasn't what it used to be and I would often hear the disk seek. It's an old 533MHz P3, Win2K Pro with 512MB/11GB. Pretty wimpy by today's standards, but with 6Mbps DSL it surfs the net great, and Office 2K is just fine for me. I keep since most files on a TB file server under my desk, I've never needed super capacity on my laptop.

As I looked around for what might be the problem, I noticed that the search index was almost 2GB! More than 20% of the data on the hard drive. I never really though about how big the index ought to be, but that surprised me. Whacking that 2GB got me down below 6GB total and performance improved right away.

I didn't really want to un-install Desktop, but couldn't see suffering 99% of the time for a better 1% search experience.

When I upgrade, I'll probably put it back. But for now, I'll just do without. Although, it does have me thinking about getting one of those new fangled perpendicular recording disk drives.....