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There are numerous desktop search products out there; after trialling many of these I decided that Copernic Desktop Search topped the list with its extensive list of customisations, integration and overall feel. PCWorld has a review up, and a comparison table of competing products and file types indexed. Keep in mind this review was conducted a year ago. You can now trial the Copernic Desktop 2.0 Beta.

My first impressions are good; the program is much more responsive, especially the loading documents in its mini viewer and the interface has received a good work over. My only complaint is that erased my version 1.x profile. Thankfully they have added the option to index files regardless of whether the computer is idle.

I recently upgraded my detonator drivers to 91.31, a beta release of which is available at Guru3D.com. Moving from 84.26 seems to have made a noticeable improvement, while significantly improving the performance for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. I was able to increase the resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768 with game play still being smoother (no benchmarks sorry).

This set comes with nVidia's new control panel, pushing the driver archive up to 64 MB. I'm pleased nVidia has finally moved the functionality out of the increasingly bloated device properties window to a dedicated application window. Being a beta release the control panel is fairly unresponsive and buggy. Initially the over clocking menu option was not appearing, but later did so after tweaking the clock and memory with RivaTuner (I don't know if the two events were related). The interface has been completely remodelled as well, and while it still needs a lot of work the categorical grouping on the primary window is certainly a step in the right direction.

For those of you who are interested I'm running on a 3.2 GHz celeron (overclocked from 2.4), an XFX 6600GT and 1G of PC2700 Corsair RAM. 

If you're interested in theming WinXP to make it look and sound like Windows Vista, then check out the Vista Transformation Pack 4.0. It is free software and does a surprisingly good job of imitating the Aero interface. One impressive feature is its low system overhead (CPU, memory etc).

One minor bug I have found relates to repaint issues during some full screen applications. While playing Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion I found that little black squares kept appearing where the systray would sit. It seems the icons which repaint themselves periodically (network connection, DU Meter etc) overwrites the foreground focus of the game. It's only minor and easily solved by hiding those icons for the duration of play but it is worth noting. Like many users I used to employ the stripped-down Win2K theme because of its low CPU and memory overhead, and lack of visual/audio distractions.