The basic idea: What if I could search my own computer as easily as I can search the web? Then I could find an email or a Word document, even a PDF document, or a previously-viewed web page, or all of those on my own computer in an instant, just by entering a few words of text that I think might be in the document or in its name.

Enter Google Desktop (GD). I discovered this a year or two ago, when I was running Windows XP, and thought it was slicker than sliced bread. Well, almost, and certainly better than anything that Microsoft offered. It didn’t work exactly right - sometimes I would click on a result and nothing would come up - but at least it did seem to find everything.

Except WordPerfect documents. I use WordPerfect and certainly prefer it to Microsoft Word, but the documents apparently have a unique format and are not correctly indexed by GD or by Microsoft’s Vista indexing software. No surprise that Microsoft would deliberately omit WordPerfect, because they have been trying to bury it with Word for years (with obvious success),…

My business requires me to safeguard the security of certain files. For years I have used Encrypted Magic Folders (EMF) from PC-Magic to encrypt those files, and to hide them from the view of an interloper. I loved it, because files were always encrypted on disk and yet were fully accessible to applications. However, when I upgraded to Vista 64, the new EMF crashed my system so completely that it was unbootable even in safe mode. I tried it twice, recovered twice with some difficulty, and gave up on EMF.

In the meantime I had heard about TrueCrypt, an open-source disk encryption package for Windows and Linux. It’s free! I must admit that after I downloaded it, I needed some time to get my mind around it.

Here are the basics:

• Using the TrueCrypt application you create a large “container” file on your system, larger than you will need to hold your encrypted files. It can be on any read/write disk, even a memory stick, and is initially filled with random data.
• The container file can be copied, moved, deleted, or renamed just like any other file. It’s not fragile.

…