The adage about books and their covers is nothing new, but in the world of freeware and shareware software, it is more prevalent that it should be. Mo-Search is the latest example. On the surface it's a fairly crudely presented application that lacks the visual spit and polish of many. But it's ruthlessly good at its job, helping you put your fingers on a file you need in double-quick time.

It does this by indexing the key areas of your hard drive where you're likely to keep your working files. This is done as part of the program's installation routine and inevitably it does take a little time. On our testbed laptop it was going through files at a rate of 1,200-1,300 per second at first to get a feel for what it needed to index, and then the process itself took just short of fifteen minutes. In that time, it indexed 21,547 files. And - strangely for computing software - its 'estimated time remaining' counter was bang on the money.

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It hunts for file types it recognises to pull into its index, with over 170 supported including Office files, HTML, source code and configurations files. E-mails are also included, but wouldn't work on our test machine as we don't use Outlook as our mail client. Without it, Mo-Search wouldn't play ball in that department.

Once the program installation routine has then fully done its work (and it does ask to live on your desktop and in your quick launch bar), a simple interface pops up that invites you to type in your search term. Do this and the results appear like lightning.

What's more, the program ranks them quite well in terms of relevance, and looks beyond the file name and into the content of the file itself. One really useful feature that lifts it above the Vista equivalent tool is the preview text that appears in the bottom half of the program's working window. For looking inside text files and suchlike without opening them up, this is really convenient and a genuine timesaver.

More advanced search tools are also available, but it's hard to imagine actually needing them. What you will need to do - and this is a slight downside to the program - is re-index from time to time. This is the trade-off for Mo-Search not constantly keeping tabs on what you're doing and reindexing everything itself, but some will find the 10 minutes you need to spend on this job every month or so a mild annoyance.

Still, this is a useful tool and, let's not forget, it's free of charge. Replete with a minimal system overhead, it's worth downloading and trying. Because if you can look past the basic presentation, there's something really helpful here.

Its lacklustre presentation hides a really useful search tool, and one with a nicely limited system footprint. Definitely worth a look.