Spotlight

I know I've mentioned it before, but I *love* the iMac.  You have *no* idea how convenient Spotlight makes things.  I've been researching camcorders and couldn't remember exactly what the resolution was on my Canon IS2 SI camera.  (Yes, my camera takes wonderful little stereo videos, but on a TV I'm sure they'd be less than perfect-looking).  I couldn't remember where I put the pdf version of the manual, but knew I'd downloaded it.  Usually I rename things something that makes sense, but I figured I didn't that time.  So I hopefully typed "Canon" into the little box in the upper right hand corner of the screen, waited literally two seconds, and clicked "Show all documents."  There before me, alas!  A gazillion files with "canon" somehow related, all sorted by type.  I saw "PDF" and expanded it.  There, behold, TWO copies of my camera's weird-named manual.  I'd downloaded it in December, and before I realized how easy it was to search a mac, downloaded it again a couple weeks ago.  (I've since killed the older copy.)

And there it is before my eyes like magic.

Windows can do similar, but trust me, it takes FAR longer if you don't have Indexing turned on, and even with that, you still have to fill out a blasted form before you can search - unlike the old 95 and 98 searches.  Egads, I hate XP's search function.  One would think they could start it out simple and THEN if you're not sure of what you're looking for, click something to do "advanced."  Zheezh.  Anywho, hence the duplication all over my hard drives.  So from now on, I'll search my computer first, then re-download.  I cannot BELIEVE how easy that was...

iMac Ingeniousness,

~nv