As we become more dependent on e-mail and information in the files on our PCs, being able to locate messages and documents becomes ever more important. Unfortunately, the search tools built into Windows and most e-mail programs are extremely slow and often lack many useful features. That's where X1 Search 3.0 comes in.

The tag line for X1 is "breaking the found barrier," and the program is indeed blazingly fast. It creates an index of all the words in your files and e-mail. This index lets X1 display search results as fast as you type search terms. As with most similar tools, index files occupy quite a bit of disk space, but with today's large hard drives this won't be a problem for most people.

X1's streamlined main window can dock at the top edge of the screen. Four category tabs list all indexed files, e-mail messages, attachments, and contacts. Built-in viewers for dozens of file types power a preview pane of selected items. To search, simply type a keyword or the beginning portion thereof in the tab's search field. All words starting with that string are highlighted in the detail list and preview; items not containing the keyword disappear. Adding more keywords or prefixes selects items containing all of them, and the new keywords get a different highlight color. Unfortunately, X1 treats each term independently. Searching on "PC Magazine", for instance, would show you every document where both words appear, not just those where the two words appear together.

Appending an equal sign makes an exact-match keyword: cat matches catch; cat= doesn't. Placing a minus sign before a keyword selects items not containing that keyword. You can fine-tune the search by putting keywords in specific detail-column headers. For example, typing spy in the Filename column will select files whose name or extension contains a word beginning with spy.

Boolean OR searches are not available. Date and numeric detail columns are treated strictly as text. And X1 will not index files inside a ZIP archive. It indexes e-mail from Outlook (including archive PST files), Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape Mail, but only Outlook users can actually reply or forward mail directly from within X1. Users can copy file details to the clipboard, but several times we found that the program had only copied one of several files we selected. Restarting X1 (per advice from tech support) cured the problem.

We found that the initial indexing went quickly. On an 833 MHz Pentium III system with 512MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive, it took 15 minutes for about 50,000 files, 5,000 e-mail messages, and 1,000 contacts, yielding a 140MB index file. Subsequent index updates occur in the background at scheduled intervals. By default, X1 indexes only specific file types and skips files larger than 300K. With these limits disabled, indexing our test system took about an hour, and the index file nearly doubled in size.

X1 sends a daily log to X1 Technologies, including a user-specific ID code to prevent piracy, debug information after a crash, and give information about what program features were used. Registered users concerned about privacy can limit the log to the ID code and debug data.

In the time it takes to type a query in Windows or Outlook, X1 Search 3.0 already has the results. The program has some minor limitations, such as the lack of Boolean OR and phrase searches. But once you've grown accustomed to X1's speed, you'll never accept waiting for search results again.