I gave Google Desktop a try this week and I'm impressed. Google Desktop is a stand alone Windows version of the Google Search engine. With it, you can index all the files on your system, your e-mail, your pdfs, and pretty much everything. Searching your local system is a snap.

The search interface is very similar to the web version. You use it in a browser just like Google, but of course it just searches your local machine instead of the entire Internet. The interface is very clean and easy to use. Plus, the searches are extremely fast. The default search mechanism in XP has always annoyed me. It has that stupid helper interface thing that just gets in the way and actually makes the search harder to use. Plus, its super slow!

You can get the latest version of Google desktop at: http://desktop.google.com

There are also a number of plugins that further enhance the product that you can download from the web site. I found the anytextfile plugin especially helpful as it allows you to index XML files which GDS does not index by default.