Disabling Windows Search in Vista: Stop hard drive running constantly
Posted By Chris Stinson in Windows on June 19, 2007
Windows Vista comes with a great new feature: Windows Search. It differs from previous versions in that it constantly indexes the hard drives. When you do search, the results are instant instead of the 5 minutes it takes in Windows XP. The downside is that your computer is indexing your hard drives for hours at a time during the day, robbing it of performance. You can see the files: SearchProtocolHost, SearchFilterHost, SearchIndexer in the task manager humming away eating up memory and cpu %.
If this new searching method isn’t important to you or you simply want the best performance all the time, you can disable it!
Type Services in the search/run bar in the start menu. Right-click “Windows Search Service” -> Select “Properties” -> Choose “Disabled” under start type. Then click “stop.” Once it has stopped, click OK. It will no longer start when Windows starts. You can always start it back up by doing the reverse.
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Chris, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know where you are, but to me you’re a God. Where Microsoft and all sorts of helplines failed, your post above has changed my life. My computer, even with ghastly bloated Vista, runs smoothly. The hard disc doesn’t run all the time as it did before. The processors aren’t working at all when the system is idle, whereas before you told me how to disable MS Indexing, they were chugging away the whole time. (For search, I’ve installed X1, which works a treat for me, though my friends also swear by Copernicus, which is free.)
One day, you’ll come to London and I will buy you a beer. Thank you!
Jonathan D
London, England
Thanks Jon.
I’ll get the kebab afterwards then.
Mark
Brighton, England
stopped scanning the drive as soon as i stopped it. thanks!
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!
IT WORKED!!!
Finally, after a year of listening to my drive run wild…
THANKS
Mike
London, Ontario, Canada
Thank you so much…..this has been driving me damned crazy for over 6 months….You’re a Star !!!!
Thanks for the direction, my hard drive FINALLY stopped running. But there is an easier way to get there. Just control alt delete and go to task manager. Select the services tab at the top and then scroll down to windows search… Rt click and select properties…
CAN’T DO EITHER ONE OF THESE. . “Servies” DOES NOTHING IN THE RUN BAR. . AND IN THE TASKMANAGER . SERVIES WIN-SEARCH WON’T GIVE ME ACCESS TO “STOP” IT?? HOW CAN I GET ACCESS TO SHUT IT OFF?
I believe you may have mistyped. It’s SERVICES
THANKS! That was so annoying.. You’re the best!
Thanks for the idea, and it did indeed slow down the constant running, but it still runs constantly. Sigh, nothing is as easy as it could be. Thanks for the help anyways, I know that was part of it.
Did both this and the suggestion by motojeff and it worked great! Thanks!