Nerds only: Giving Xobni another try (Updated)

Back in January I tried the beta version of Xobni*-- a new system for indexing and arraying your email within Outlook that is now getting a lot of attention, thanks to a rave in the NYT yesterday. (Or, "this morning," US time.) In the beta version, I found it so incredibly CPU-intensive and greedy for system resources that it brought my PC (ThinkPad T60, 2Gb RAM, 4GB "ReadyBoost" RAM supplement) nearly to a halt. True, this ThinkPad was running the hated Windows Vista at the time, so it was looking for any excuse to halt. And true, I was asking it to index many GBs worth of old Outlook .PST files. But I unloaded Xobni, thinking: wouldn't it be nice if this actually worked. Several friends say that the new version works better. We'll see. And this note is also a teaser for the omnibus, final MacAir / MacMini / ThinkPad compare-and-contrast exercise later this week. UPDATE: Xobni still breaks my T60 laptop. Consumes so many CPU cycles and memory that everything else stops. Will un-install, reinstall, and try one more time. * Xobni's name has the same etymology as that of Shanghai's beloved local beer, REEB. Reeb is of course "beer" spelled backward, and...

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2008/05/nerds-only-giving-xobni-another-try-updated/8020/