Windows Desktop Search has unfortunately had a bit of a spotty record as of late. Those of you early adopters that have been running the Office 2007 beta have been subjected to the previous version which had the UI stripped out of it. This wasn't a problem for searching Outlook, but otherwise it was pretty neutered. Worse, the indexer ate up a ridiculous amount of resources, and performance was pretty spotty.

Finally Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 has been released, and the GUI is back, along with improved performance and more modest resource usage. The indexer is happily grinding away on my workstation, and although it tries to stay out of your way by only indexing aggressively when you're not actively using your computer, you can set it to go ahead and index anyway, which I've done. So far I'm pleasantly surprised that doing this hasn't caused any sort of noticeable lag - of course it remains to be seen how it performs once the index is up to a more realistic size.

This is a must download for any of you that are currently limping along with Office 2007 and the previous hobbled version of Windows Desktop Search. For the rest of you that are actually using WDS rather than one of the better free alternatives like Google Desktop, Copernic Desktop Search, Yahoo! Desktop Search (there's no shortage in this category of software), you'll probably want to have a look at this version as well.