I’ve been singing the praises of Lookout for a while now, although I was beaten to the punch on this blog.

Well it seems Lookout has some competition and after just one day of use I’m impressed.

The free Copernic Desktop Search allows you to search across the contents of your PC including files, emails, attachments, music and video. It’s lightning fast although the search tool it can install on your task bar can make it a little cluttered, especially if, like me, you’re running Google Desk Bar and have Windows Media Player running in minimised mode. Unfortunately it doesn’t index Firefox bookmarks or history, only IE, nor does it index OneNote files but with any luck and an avalanche of requests that will hopefully change.

From what I’ve read it’s offering what Microsoft plan to include in some future version of Windows and what Google are planning on offering in a tool called ‘Puffin’. Why wait though? It’s small, fast, works and is available now.

ONE HOUR LATER…

More and more impressed – wanted to find REM’s ‘Bad Day’ in my disorganised music folder, I swear it was displaying the result before I finished typing the ‘y’.

Having problems accessing some email accounts this morning. The exchange with their tech support ended with this :

Your connectivity is perfect. All I can suggest is using another email client, another PC and if possible disable your firewall if you run one. If you can connect just fine at http://mail.yourdomain.com then the issue must be client related.

That’s the geek way of saying “I’ve run out of ideas, you’re on your own.” One reset of the computer later and all is fine.

No doubt this is preaching to the converted but it has to be said.

Start using Firefox.

Go and download it, install it, love it.

Now.

I bought a new USB key yesterday and plugged it in. All went well and then I received the following message :

Your device is installed but may not function properly until you reboot.

How many people these days would know what boot/reboot means? Don’t most people ‘start’ ,’shut down’ or ‘restart’ their computer? It’s similar to the icon tray icon for Microsoft Money – ‘Run Money’ is one of the right click choices. Most people these days would ‘start’ money.

Computer related language has changed and we geeks need to take this in to account when letting non-geeks know what’s happening with their software and hardware. It’s time to unlearn.