If you are a Windows user, and have a lot of information, and let’s face it, being a genealogist you probably do, whether it’s photos, documents in various formats (text, word processor, Adobe Acrobat/PDF, etc.), as well as important email, you might want to give Google Desktop 2.0 (beta) a quick look.
What I find most useful out of it, is the Quick Find feature – for Windows users, it’s basically a cross between Google for your desktop, and Apple’s Spotlight for Mac OS X.
From Google:
Quick Find makes launching applications and searching your desktop easy and fast. From within any application, just type a few letters or words into Sidebar’s search box and you’ll see the top results pop up instantly. You can use Quick Find to launch applications without having to deal with the Start menu; for example, if you have Microsoft Word installed, you can launch it by just typing “wor” into the Sidebar search box and selecting “Microsoft Word” in the list of results that appears. You can also use Quick Find from the Deskbar and Floating Deskbar, which are described in a separate section.
It actually searches inside of your documents, which is handy if you want to look up all of the documents you have with a certain person’s name, etc. Your not limited by filenames, since the filenames aren’t usually indicitive of what all is contained within a document.