As well as its much-vaunted Internet searching capabilities, Sherlock (in Mac OS 8.5 and up) can also speed up local searches of your hard drive enormously by maintaining and updating an index of its contents. You must also create an index in order to use Sherlock's content searching and summary features. Problem: indexing takes a while, during which time you can't really do much with your Mac. You can schedule the indexing to happen automatically, but not everyone can or wants to leave their machine on overnight.

Caption: Once you've indexed your hard drive, Sherlock becomes a very powerful ally in organising your mountains of data, but be warned: indexing takes time, especially if you have a lot of files.

Solution: start Sherlock indexing manually last thing before you leave work. When the Indexing Progress dialogue appears, switch to the Finder and shut down. Another dialogue will appear asking if you want to finish indexing before you shut down. Click Continue, and as soon as Sherlock has finished its duty the machine will shut down. Alternatively, you could use the shareware Index and Shutdown, from Carnation Software (www.carnationsoftware.com), which does much the same thing but with a simple menu-driven interface.