Dan Warne23 October 2006, 2:30 PM
Since installing Vista on my work PC, I'm beginning to know what the end of the world would feel like. It's an apocalyptic wasteland strewn with poorly organised files; I'm the feral pig foraging haplessly through folders.
I'm beginning to know what the end of the world would feel like... an apocalyptic wasteland strewn with poorly named files and icons lying stacked on top of each other. I'm foraging through folders like a feral pig, desperately seeking out the latest version of that Excel spreadsheet, no, not that version, the latest version!
Ever since I installed Vista, Windows desktop search hasn't worked very well. My normal laser-guided ability to hone in on any information on my computer at the drop of my boss's hat has been mamed. I'm hobbling round like a war veteran who still has a stump of a mouse-clicking hand but prefers to type with his nose.
OK, enough of the histrionics.
Microsoft had desktop search running pretty well in XP with the optional add-on Windows Desktop Search. You could type in a few characters and search results were displayed and refined nearly instantly.
In Vista, there's something badly wrong with the desktop search.
For a start, it's slow. When I type a search into the Start Menu search field, it can take five seconds or more to start displaying more than a couple of results, even on my grunty Pentium D PC with 2GB RAM. And yes, the PC is permanently switched on, and I've thoroughly checked indexing settings to be sure all the locations that need to be are being indexed.
There's also no meaningful sorting of results that I can see. The top of the list will often be documents from several years ago -- it's not even backward chronologically ordered as far as I can tell. I thought Apple's Spotlight desktop search in Mac OS X 10.4 was pretty rudimentary. Now I've seen an attempt that's even worse. And it's destined to be what 95% of the world's PC users experience.
The promise of Vista is that desktop search is beautifully simple and integrated into the OS. After all, it's what we got after Microsoft skittled the over-ambitious WinFS plan. It should have been so easy... one tap of the Windows key, start typing, get results.
It's not. It sucks.
Sure, Vista isn't a final product yet, but it is up to release candidate 2. That's gotta stand for something. Surely RC2 is pretty darn close to bug-free, feature-complete.
Based on search performance alone, Vista is nowhere near ready for release.
I knew I was taking a leap of faith by upgrading my primary work machine to an unfinished Microsoft OS, but this is seriously affecting my work productivity. I'm seriously contemplating going back to XP, which annoys me in other ways (featureless, time-consuming file navigation dialogues; a desktop explorer that doesn't treat a JPEG much differently from an MP3) but is less annoying than having next to no desktop search.
I'm a desktop search addict... I'm like the street kid that is given his first few hits free of charge and then the supply is cut off unless he pays up. I've come to rely on desktop search; I've stopped filing things neatly and started relying on search to find anything at a moment's notice.
Sure, sure, you can say it's all my fault, and I should have kept on filing things neatly. But tell me: do you still take the time to cut and paste people's contact details into your address book application meticulously? I stopped filing into Outlook contacts months ago... it's so much more efficient to search on their name and find their most recent contact details in their email signature.
XP... I didn't know how much I loved thee until I lost thee.