There have been a couple of times I needed to find stuff on my computer fast! The windows searching capabilities are terrible. Bad Microsoft! I tried Google Desktop a little while ago and I liked it but rarely ever used it. I keep forgetting I have it installed. So When I heard about the new Google Desktop I needed to try it. It now has a docking capability that has plugins that can add other benefits. I have a 19in monitor so I can give up desktop space. I actually have two monitors with two computers on my desk so I can easily give up space on one of my monitors.

I’ve been happy with Yahoo’s Konfabulator with it’s widgets. Some widgets from there are very useful like website monitor and a timer. One thing it doesn’t have is a way to dock them to the side of the desktop. I don’t like having to resize my windows so I can see the widgets. I don’t want to see a widget over something I am trying to read. Now if google desktop had more plugins like the widgets from yahoo it would be perfect for me. So at this time I can see some benefits to Google desktop but it’s not exactly what I need at this time. I will keep using Konfabulator and google desktop as just a searching capability for now.

Synergy is a software that I recently found which allows me to use two computers with one keyboard and mouse. A sort of KM switch without the wires. It works over your home network passing the mouse and keyboard info to the other computer via network. When I move the mouse off one screen it switches to the other computer. Exactly the way it works with two monitors on one computer if using windows XP. In theory one can have more than 2 computers. In the management area it has 4 possible positions for the monitors. I was all ready to buy myself a KM switch but this works even better than the ones I was looking at. I can easily copy and paste text between two computers. NOW that’s impressive!

I like trying new things out so when I heard about a new yahoo messenger I had to try it. Now there are many things I hate about it and some interesting things. They are trying to get into the phone calling area. Now I haven’t tried there net2phone or the Call Computer stuff just yet. I’ll try the call computer when I can find someone who installed the beta version also. That is the biggest problem I found. All the added features are not compatible to the older versions. I can’t use the voice capability anymore.

There is a cool feature that one can drag and drop pictures in the message window and it will transfer it to the other person. Now that is cool but I of course can’t try it unless the other person has that capability. Now I am all for more features but please give the capability to work with the older versions. I have to go back to the older version so I can use voice chat. ugh. I’ll try it later when more people update or when they have every feature in the current version working in their beta version.