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My desktop searchin' gets done by Candy Labs' AppRocket. I honestly don't know how the features compare, because after I downloaded it, I killed Google Desktop and I haven't tried anything else since.

AppRocket sounds like it does the same thing QuickSilver does. Some other cool hacks for Windows are ObjectDock and ObjectDesktop, which make Windows look like OS X. ObjectDesktop includes WindowBlinds, an alternative skinning product for Windows.

Hot corners on the other hand, I thought Windows supported those. Maybe it was just the After Dark screensaver I used to use... Regardless, one thing you should have noticed about Windows is that it isn't hard to find software to do whatever you're searching for.

Want to talk about rigidity? How about the fact that in Windows you only have one command line interpreter? And cmd.exe can't even copy/paste like a normal app.

There's a few things you can change to fix that. For instance, I change the defaults to use Quick Edit mode (hightlight then right-click to copy, right-click by itself to paste) and turn on Autocomplete (tab completion). Makes it feel a bit more like a UNIX shell. Too bad ls doesn't work in it. *writes up a quick .bat file to run dir/w when ls is typed*

Besides, as someone already pointed out, bash has been ported to Windows. You can use it with or without cygwin.

I just want a fast filename search for Windows.

I don't care about content, since most of the files I work with don't have searchable content in the first place, and I give them useful filenames anyway. I just forget where they're saved sometimes, or want a quicker way to get to them.

Even with indexing turned on (does that help with filename searches?), Windows takes 2 or 3 minutes to search all my drives by filename only.

I know there's Ava Find, which is very fast and does what I want, but the UI sucks, and AppRocket, which is also fast but isn't really a search tool as much as a launcher.

So, are there any others that work like the Windows Explorer search, but faster?

Windows users already have Approcket. It does the same thing as Launchbar.

App Rocket is an awesome file launcher. Does quick searches of your harddrive but also allows you to search google, wikipedia, etc. Even supports ID3 tags. Costs money though, but give the trial a swing.

Microsoft has a huge marketing department so they can please the people they are trying to sell to. Linux developers are their own market. By following Linux developers you are, more often then not, finding out what developers, like myself, want and need. By following Microsoft, you are finding what glitzy feature convinces someone that, maybe it's time to retire Office 97. The fact is, I have found few people, if any, who truly want a 3D desktop enviroment. I know others think diffrently, but i found XPs default taskbar seemed childish and condiscending.
frankly, i don't care if the casual consumer uses linux or not (though a larger market share would have some benefits). the people who develop for linux generally want and need the same things as my self and i'm happy.
That being said, faster file searching is definatly a useful tool. But if the registry in Windows is any indication of what the file system is going to look like in order for anything to get found, i don't want it.
On a random side note, App Rocket is a nifty program launcher for windows that finds files very fast.

Direct-access user interfaces, like Apple's Spotlight, Black Tree Software's QuickSilver, ObjectiveDevelopment's LaunchBar (all for Mac OS X) and Candy Labs' AppRocket (for Windows), are the future of file management interfaces.

The spacial vs. browser-style debate isn't worth winning, because either way you're sticking to metadata-ignorant heirarchies that humans just aren't very good at dealing with beyond a certain point.

I was looking for something similar and in the end I came up with the idea of using LaunchBar at home and AppRocket at work.

It's not ideal, but it does mean that I can just shove everything remotely useful in as a bookmark and use them to search my bookmarks (and remember the search terms I use).

Try Approcket. It's a direct clone of Launchbar for Windows. Only it looks like they've taken down the download for the moment, in preparation of final release.