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I'd like to know how to proceed in order to permanently disable the Windows Search Indexer in my otherwise fantastic Windows7 OS?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Answer accepted by question author
All you should need to do is click the Start button, type Services in the search field, and click the Enter key. Scroll down and right-click on Windows Search and choose Properties. Change the Startup type to Disabled which will stop it from running when you reboot your machine. You can also click the Stop button to stop the service immediately.
Barbara
From what I see, it's that the "Windows Search" service on that screen is badly named. It should have been named "Windows Search Indexing Service". Windows Search will still work in general; just the parts that rely on the indexing stop working. Those parts include searching within the Libraries setup and file searching from the Start/Orb box (installed software and Control Panel items remain searchable). Other searching still works, as when you navigate to a folder and use the Search box in the upper right corner.
WRONG. That disables "SEARCH" just as it says (which also disables indexing). BUT...for those of us that only want the "indexing" disabled, it's a different procedure - which I don't have on hand at the moment.
The issue I have with Search Indexer is on my laptop it uses anywhere from 22 to 26 percent of my processing power (power might not be the correct word - but it is using that percentage) all the time. It slows down everything I do on my laptop. The little hit in performance every time I open a folder with the service disable is nothing compared to it running full time using up a 1/4 of my processor's resources. That's like using an entire core on a 4 core CPU. Disabling it for me has reduced my CPU usage and released 40 MB of RAM back to the system. What I would really like to know is why it runs constantly on my laptop. I thought once the Indexer was done it would stop running. It would not stop for me even after leaving my laptop running for 3 hours without me touching it. I am not sure what is going on in that situation.
Ostensibly, it automatically runs every time there is (a sufficient?) amount of file activity so that it can stay up to date (the index would be useless if lots of files have been modified since the last time the indexer ran).
The issue I have with Search Indexer is on my laptop it uses anywhere from 22 to 26 percent of my processing power (power might not be the correct word - but it is using that percentage) all the time. It slows down everything I do on my laptop. The little hit in performance every time I open a folder with the service disable is nothing compared to it running full time using up a 1/4 of my processor's resources. That's like using an entire core on a 4 core CPU. Disabling it for me has reduced my CPU usage and released 40 MB of RAM back to the system. What I would really like to know is why it runs constantly on my laptop. I thought once the Indexer was done it would stop running. It would not stop for me even after leaving my laptop running for 3 hours without me touching it. I am not sure what is going on in that situation.
