It always baffles me how long it takes for Windows to search for a file while the GNU's `find` command churns through filenames and paths like it's nothing.

Work locks me into Outlook but god I wish I could just grep my inbox

If your sysadmins are kind, Outlook can expose IMAP/SMTP.

Nirsoft's Search My Files gets me pretty close to Win2000 search.

Windows Everything finds any file globally in the blink of an eye, let's you sort in real time by size/date, live-edit your query, and also perform operations on the result in the list, so much better that any find

Just so there's no confusion, eviks means "everything" by voidtools, which is really amazing. The difference in search speed is like day and night.

It's highly optimized, but it still needs quite a bit of RAM when the index is large. But RAM is cheap nowadays. It's the only thing I really, really miss when I am on Linux. (there is FSearch, but it's not quite as great, yet)

RIP Google Desktop, 2004-2011

Man, what a beautiful era of Google that was…

Losing Google Wave, then Google Desktop search and then Google Reader like shot ducks in a row truly signified the death-knell of "Don't Be Evil" days.

Also lost Google Toolbar in 2011. Though that was far less essential once Chrome came out.