Discussion on:

DOWNLOAD: Hack Google

http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-10877-5854750.html

Is Google desktop installed on your PC? Are you worried about having too much Google?

Is Google desktop the same as the toolbar add-in? If so, nope, it isn't, so no, I'm not.

Google is my home page, so one click on the "Home" icon takes me there. Firefox does a pretty good job of blocking the pop-ups. I didn't really see the toolbar doing much for me. Maybe I just don't know what it does besides give me a search box at the top of my browser. I'll read the article and see if I'm missing anything.

I mistook Google Desktop for the Google toolbar plug-in for browsers. Desktop appears to bring Google's search functionality to my local data.

After looking at it, I still don't plan to use it. I'm one of those anal-retetive types who keeps his files and e-mail pretty organized. It's probably a hold over from the days when a 20Mb hard drive cost several hundred dollars.

I still remember wondering, "why would I ever need a 20MB hard drive?"

I have installed both the Google desktop and the toolbar, and uninstalled them. Desktop just consumes WAY too many resources, having a similar effect to when you first install a virus scanner on a pristine machine, only worse. The toolbar is a known cause of crashes in Firefox, and uninstalling it make firefox run much better.