Google Desktop vs. Windows Search

So my 8gb SD card started acting up this morning; Threw it in the Dell 9300 at work and was greeting w/ 7.something GBs o' gobbledygook. Lovely. So I figure it's FUBAR. Brought it home, threw it in the D80 and hooked it up to my 5760 via USB cable (card reader won't read 4+gb cards). Worked just fine. How wacky is that?

So I see that there are a bunch of files from a trip earlier in the month that I could've sworn that I'd copied over to my HD, but couldn't find. Figured I'd finally give Google Desktop a reason to exist (as I'd never used it on this computer before). Before trying the files on the card, I thought I'd give it a test run on a known file in a temporary photo folder on my desktop. Just a regular JPEG- nothing special. Easy, right?

Can't say that I'm impressed w/ the bloated beast that is Google Desktop. Didn't find it. Odd enough that it's called Google Desktop and it can't find a single JPEG on my desktop. Thought I'd see if the clunky built-in search in XP was up to the task. Pasted the same file name into the Explorer search window and let it rip. Took a few minutes, but it found it. Can't say that I'm impressed w/ Google's search abilities here. Anytime you lose to the built-in Windows search, you're in a pretty sorry state.

All of this makes me wonder if I've missed some sort of setting or index issue, but looking through the settings, I didn't see anything obviously out of sort. That being the case, Google Desktop has been banished from my taskbar. Although I'm not a big fan of these bloated search mechanisms, I've got enough photos spread around willy-nilly that it probably wouldn't hurt to have a functional one installed. Might have to give the Windows Search (or whatever it's called) a try. Or, appropriately enough, I'll have to Google around for a better alternative to the failed Google Desktop search.