Google Desktop, the horror

by Ian Betteridge on October 20, 2004

Larry Seltzer has a good piece on why Google Desktop Search Doesn’t Threaten Security. However, I’ve found that Google Desktop does threaten one thing: my sanity. It’s the first piece of software I’ve found in quite a while that can reduce the performance of my laptop to a crawl at a single stroke, thanks to its large-scale background activities.

Of course, my laptop isn’t all that powerful – a 1GHz Centrino with 512MB of RAM. And of course, it’ll be better once it’s done all the necessary indexing of pre-existing files. But on a laptop, I don’t want to leave it on overnight to do it. So, for me at least, it’s bye-bye Google Desktop.

http://www.Anon.com Anon

Duh! – it’s no different to Windows indexing system – switch that off and watch your performance improve.
Duncan Corps

A new version of Microsoft Windows will usually reduce hardware “to a crawl at a single stroke”. lol I am teh M$ joxor, or something.

Anyhoo, since when was one gigahertz and five hundred and twelve megabytes not “all that powerful”? Man alive, hardware like that should fly along and only badly written software would say otherwise (speaking as someone who spent six years rewriting badly written software such that it ran five to ten times faster in less resources).
bill balmer

Yes – Google desktop is not ready for primetime. Love the functionality but it hoses perfromance. It is nature of the indexing they need to do – so we have to wait to get more powerful computer or until Google figures out how to schedule/fine-tune their alogithms.

I just turn off indexing when I work – and let it catch up when I am not working. That’s the option we need.