AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

Have you ever needed to find something in an email or in a file on your computer and could only remember a word or two it contained? You couldn’t remember the file name or where it came from. What would you do? I’ll tell you what I do. I use a program that has indexed all of my documents, music and emails and with one click will search through all of them very quickly to find the items that match what I’m looking for.

There are two free desktop search programs that I would recommend. The first is by Copernic and can be downloaded at http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/home/download.html. I’ve been using this program for searching for several years and really enjoy its speed and accuracy. It indexes in the background whenever the computer is idle so it’s very up-to-date with it’s index.

The other program is from Google and can be downloaded at http://desktop.google.com/. The latest version has been streamlined quite a bit, which is good because the prior versions have been pretty bloated with extra things that really aren’t necessary. Of course, the Google program is much better at searching the internet than Copernic.

Either one will find documents, files, music, emails based on searching even a single word contained within the item. They are both extremely fast, due to having everything already indexed. My preference is the Copernic program but I haven’t really worked much with the new Google version, which just recently was released. I’m using that one on my laptop so if my preference changes, I’ll let you know.

For a time-saver, when you just can’t remember the whens and wheres, a desktop search works wonders and I’d really recommend you have one.

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