Disabling Windows Search in Vista: Stop hard drive running constantly
Posted By Chris in Windows
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.
Related posts:
- Speed up low memory system running Windows Vista
- A few initial thoughts on Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Vista Counterfeit Changes
- Windows XP/2003/Vista Password Recovery
- Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Released: Improvements!
| 
Print This Post
|
[...] hard drive running constantly. windows vista comes with a great new feature: windows Search. …http://www.iishacks.com/index.php/2007/06/19/disabling-windows-search-in-vista-stop-hard-drive-runni…4sysops - How to disable Vista’s desktop search indexing Windows SearchBut I found out that windows [...]
[...] Windows Vista you can turn off windows live search, and see if that helps, link, I’ve also heard that SP1 helps a [...]
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!