Google today released the finished version of Google Desktop, a powerful search engine that scours your hard drive for files or snippets of text, at lightening speed. There is simply no comparison to the utterly lame search facilities built into Windows. It now searches pdf files as well as Word, Powerpoint, and most popular e-mail programs. Google offers add-in bits to allow for the searching of Open Office files, as well. Google Desktop is free and powerful and simple to install and use, and will make you wonder how you ever got by without it. Click here to learn more.

And yet. Good as Google Desktop is, we here at What's Up still prefer the equally free and swift and easy and polished Copernic Desktop, which does all the same stuff while also searching WordPerfect files, which Google Desktop still does not. Both programs work fine with Windows XP, but Copernic is said to be the best choice for Windows 98 or ME. Click here to learn more, or here for a useful review.