Tech Spotlight

Microsoft has updated there search technology inside Windows XP and Windows Vista to Version 4.0.  You can grab this through Windows Update in a 9 MB package and once installed you may have to reboot and then it will rebuild your index from scratch.  Windows Search helps you find and preview documents, emails, music files, photos and other items on your computer.  You also can gain instant results when searching in particular programs.

This new version of there instant search improves indexing of decrypted documents, support for indexing online mailboxes, faster previewer updates for Windows XP, per user group policy settings, Windows software updates for Watson errors, reduced effect on Microsoft Exchange when you index email in online mode included with no local cache, support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexing locations, prevention of customized index locations in the Control Panel, prevention of automatically adding shared folders to the index, prevention from quering the index remotely and speedier indexing performance.

With Google having there own desktop search it keeps Microsoft on top of there game by improving there search technology within Windows.  Windows Search on my system is already almost always instantaneous and is one of the features I really like with Windows Vista.  Although this is not a required update, you might get a performance boost on your system and it is worth updating to the latest version.