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Trust me it's very good and yeah, it's 100 times better than Googles little search tool.

Yeah, Google's wasn't so special. What'd be more interesting would be a comparison with e.g. X1 (or Yahoo Desktop Search at least -- a free licensed subset), or Copernic.

The UI is the same as the last Enterprise release from a couple months ago.

However, it has major changes to the indexer to significantly reduce disk I/O while crawling, to improve indexing of Outlook e-mail, and other bug fixes and design improvements.

This beta is very near RTM quality. There are a couple of small bugs to be fixed up, and several localization issues to take care of before RTM. Updating from this beta to the RTM will be very easy (the update will appear on Windows Update, and it won't require an index rebuild - unless something unforeseen comes up between now and then).

It has nothing to do with Firefox.

Well, it works whether Firefox is there or not.

Doh! That's no good. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any problems such as that, nor any possible causes.

However, more details are always helpful...

It sounds like this wasn't an upgrade. Did you install the standalone version or did you install it via the Live Toolbar?

What OS version and Outlook version is installed? Do you have the new Onfolio beta installed? Any other WDS add-ins like the Thunderbird add-in?

How long did you wait after pressing "Browse..."? It can sometimes take several seconds.

Do you receive a crash or Error Reporting window when you close it?

I'm sorry to hear you're encountering this problem. If it's not too much of an inconvenience, you could PM me the answers to the above questions and I might be able to help diagnose/debug the problem. If there is a bug here I'd love to find it before it's too late to fix in the RTW build.

The problem seems to have solved itself, I've restarted and made sure outlook is running smoothly (I think that may have been the problem, in that the browse was waiting for a responce from outlook which was locked up due to a network error). It still takes about 20 seconds to load, during which there is no message or timer or anything. Having some kind of timer would make the proccess much smoother.

If you still want answers to those question here they are:
XPPRO SP2
Outlook 2003 (latest service pack)
No Onfolio (I didn't like it)
I've don't have any third party add-ins except the zip and rar i-filters

Hope thats useful, thanks very much for your reponce.

Jack

I know =/ I'm dying to get it out there, really. As soon as we can, we will.

The problem was that WDS was taking too long to shutdown on some machines. We've made major changes to the indexer to improve performance, especially during shutdown. Please let us know if you still see that window!

Will do, to early to say since I've only had one restart since installing it. Fingers crossed but, it pained me very much uninstalling the app last time. heh.

This beta version is English only. Very soon we'll be releasing the final 2.6.5 version which will include international support.

Unfortunately that may not have the intended effect (you may seem some unexpected behavior in the results view). This is because the system doesn't normally recognize .log as containing text.

To fix it, you'll want to:

1) Open regedit as an Administrator.
2) Navigate to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.log key
3) Right-click on the key and select “New String Value”
4) Name the string “Content Type” and set it to “text/plain”

Source Link

"MSN Desktop Search" was a temporary name during the beta. The official product name is Windows Desktop Search. So the answer is - they're the same thing =)

So yes, if you're still running "MSN Desktop Search" you should upgrade to the newest version of the "MSN Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search".

Great, what about moving from MSN Desktop Search 2.05 to WDS. Is a complete new index required? Will MS Update notify automatically?

If you have the MSN Toolbar with WDS version 2.05 - you have a few options.

1) Upgrade to the Windows Live Toolbar beta.
2) Install WDS 2.6.5 beta, which will uninstall the MSN Toolbar but preserve your settings.
3) Keep what you have until the Live Toolbar is finished, and upgrade then.

In either case, the WDS index will have to be rebuilt, but it will happen automatically.

For users of 2.05 (also called "2.5" - you will not receive a notification via Windows Update since your version of WDS is bundled with the MSN Toolbar. Your updates come from MSN. When the Live Toolbar 3.0 version is out of BETA status, they will deliver a "toast" notification recommending that you update.

Only users of WDS 2.6 or later will see updates offered via Windows Update.

Seems like the same version and featureset mix we have with MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger. The saga seems to continue

I installed it (being an old Lookout fan, this is the only product I will install ) and found no major issues. The rebuilding of the index takes a lot of time but at least the settings are preserved.

What is nice is that WDS is clean and not cluttered with all the MSN stuff like toolbars, etc.

One issue: when clicking on "Check for Updates" it should force open IE because it opened Firefox on my system and I was presented with some text about it not working, having to download IE although present obviously.

The rest seems to work fine, when is the RTM expected?

"Check for updates" should just point to Windows Update, which I believe has always required IE. Nothing suspicious about that.


This isn't like MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger at all. It's just that you can get WDS by itself, or bundled with the MSN/WinLive Toolbar.

Basically, WDS is a redistributable Windows component just like DirectX, the .NET Framework, etc. In Vista it will be a part of the platform out-of-the-box. Kind of the same deal as Avalon/WPF and other technologies that are included with Vista but available down-level on XP as add-ons.


RTW of 2.6.5 is expected this month (no promises, and no firm dates. Don't quote this. Just giving you an idea).

Hi, I meant that the check for updates function in WDS takes the default browser. However only IE is supported for Windows Update/Microsoft Update and thus WDS should just pull up IE independantly of the systems default browser.

This is a lot customer friendly as it does not result in error messages. Additionally I then need to start Windows Update manually via Start menu to check for updates.

Sorry if I was unclear about that.

Indeed, you're probably right. Thanks for the suggestion
I'll bring that up with our PMs to figure out if we canchange it for the next release if it makes sense.

I did notice something strange with 2.6.5 beta. It recently lost all Outlook data in the indexer and had to re-index again. I had noticed this with the enterprise search version I tried a month ago also but not with MSN Desktop Search (2.5).

So you expanded the "My Documents" node and they aren't under there? Is that where they live on your hard disk?

I can see all of my "My Musics", "My Pictures", and "My Videos" folders. Are you running this new Beta or an older version?

I am sure I am running this version and I had no knowledge of WDS before. I've only went into 3rd-party search programs lastweek before WDS I was using Google Desktop. I was going to PM you but I can't find your username in the Neowin forum database . Yes I expanded "My Documents" node by double-clicking on it, all the "default" WinXP folders didn't show such as "My Musics, Pictures, Videos" It does search and it did index those folders but I wanted to exclude some folders in there.