Useful, and free: Lookout, XP Backup

Nothing better than finding a couple of free utilities that are actualy useful.

Lookout: this is a local search client that integrates with Outlook.  I am quite impressed, it took about 15 minutes to index my exchange content, plus a couple .pst archives, plus everything in My Documents.  Now I can do full text search over all of these from a toolbar in Outlook, and results show up immediately.  They even do a nice hover-over preview, so you can see the first few lines of each email in the result set (preview doesn't work for documents, unfortunately.)  And it's not thrashing my RAM or hard drive, it seems to be a good background citizen.  The app was built by Lookout Software, which Microsoft acquired back in July.

XP Backup: XP Pro has a neat little backup utility built in.  In about 15 minutes, it had bundled up all the documents and files on my tablet into a 1GB .bkf file, and then after I had reinstalled the OS, I was able to restore from that file in even less time.  It looks like it has the smarts to do some basic scheduling and incremental backups as well.  In any event, is was more convenient than trying to manually copying and restoring a bunch of directories.