Desktop Search for Windows x64

Windows released version 4 of its desktop search recently, and I must say that it (mostly) works well. With the Vista desktop, one simply can begin typing a search string at the start menu, and Windows will present the search results there as you type.

The problem: UNC indexing isn't apparently supported in the 64 bit environments, at least not with Server 2008, and the network shares I want to index are stored on Windows Server 2000 boxes: those won't run the new indexing tool.

So what to do?


Of course: Google Desktop. It's fast, it supports network share indexing, and it's got a very intuitive interface.

But here's the problem: That says: "Google Desktop is not currently compatible with your operating system. It requires a 32-bit version of Windows..."

Ugh. Leaving out the rant, there's a happy solution. Before going to the solution that works in the corporate environment, Copernic Desktop Search is worth looking at for those at home. Unfortunately, work is really where I need this, and Copernic requires a fee for corporate users.

So we're back to Google. It turns out that Google Desktop version 5.1.706.29690 *does* in fact work with 64 bit versions of Windows. So all is happy in search land.

Filehippo can get you that version (and others) of Google Desktop here.

Note that later versions (like 5.7.802.22438) also will install on Win x64, but I've not been able to get them to index files, especially network shares. So if you've installed a later version and constantly see "Crawl not yet started", try an earlier version.

[Edit]
Google has heard the call for 64-bit support, and responded with this post:http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25631
to wit:

If you'd like to install and use Google Desktop on 64-bit Windows in an unsupported capacity, you can do so by using the /force flag when using the command line to install Google Desktop.
Command line argument: googledesktopsetup.exe /force

So, it's unsupported, and they note that certain features may not work. So it might be worth a try. For me, I'm content with the functionality I've got. Anyone had any experience using this method?