Agree, it is a nifty tool which does a remarkable job of finding lost information and comes for free. But, like any other software crafted by humans, it also suffers from imperfections.
I had problems getting it to work for me. A while ago, I had tried its beta avatar but, it did not install on my box. Reason: it refused to cohabit with an antivirus that was running on my box and got into DLL conflicts with it. After this, I had shelved the idea and nearly forgotten about it.
Yesterday, at the behest of a colleague, again I decided to look at this tool. Downloaded latest Google Desktop 2 (GD2) from Google's website and double-clicked on its setup exe. To my surprise, the 'wizard' did not seek any installation directory after showing up wonted license and copyright dialogs. It is my box and I would like to have a say over where I put what. Wizard presumably thought I am a dork and automatically decided a 'path' for me. This was not the only thing. Midway, wizard balked and threw up a message like "Could not create/open database" with some arbitrary error code in it. Checked out GD2 Help Center and did exactly what it said. Uninstalled and reinstalled several times ...no different results.
GD2 recommends 4GB of free space to park its indexes and I had atleast 6GB of real estate on all partitions. Clearly there was something wrong or untested and undocumented. I nearly broke my head...:-) and then realised that I do lots of avi/mpeg stuffs on my PC. What, if the discs are hugely fragmented? Ran the defragmenter on all partitions and returned to the installation... lo, it went through without any fuss this time. I had a sense of both, jubilation and anger. Angry, because I expected to see this documented but was happy that I 'discovered' it myslef!
GD2 is going on 'happliy ever after'.
3 comments:
Your dissatisfaction is natural. Even my enthusiasm about this little thing is dropping each day. My issue with google desktop is that it never seems to update the index, it adds new items into the index but it does NOT remove non-existent items fro the index. On my comp it still lists files/mails in a search that were deleted from the disk long back! :) So when you try to accesss such items from the search list, the OS cribs saying that the item does NOT exist!
So "Everything by google (that glitters) need NOT be gold"!
Yes, I also sensed similar thing but, then thought I may not be keeping my PC on and idle sufficiently long for GD2 to utilize CPU and update its indexes. But, it may be a genuine defect in the software? Is Google listening...Yahoo Desktop is already announced!
:-)
Here it is!
A formal hole discovered in GD2 IE Bug Lets Hackers Phish With Google Desktop
For more geeky insight visit here
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