Even with the new supposedly anti-monopolistic search features in SP1 due to Google's complaints, if you turn the Microsoft Search indexing service off ... everytime you do a search, you get ...

"Your searches might be slow because the index is not running"

... with no option to 'never show this message again.'

Oh my. Anybody know of a way to turn off that nagging message?

turn the indexing service on. kiddn

That's wonderful Vista for ya!

There's got to be a hack to get rid of the notice, somewhere.

Personally, I've never seen much search performance benefit in running with indexing on in any version of Windows, including Vista.

My solution to search performance issues was to switch from Windows Explorer to XYplorer (freeware version, of course).

Incredibly faster searches than Explorer, and I like the setup better. I do miss the thumbnails I had in Explorer and freeware alternative "xplorer2".

I now use XYplorer almost exclusively. When I absolutely need thumbnails, I use freeware xplorer2.

The paid XYplorer version has some nice added features (including thumbnails) and I'm really tempted.







edit to add--Oh! Another very limitation (to me at least) in Windows Explorer...the maximum number of characters I could put in the search field was around 256 (a 2^8 restriction) (there are some really funky programming glitches that can reduce this number substantially, and/or cause search look-ups to report the wrong results, too)

With XYplorer, this limit is 1024 characters (including the ";" term separators) in the search field, and I've yet to see any programming glitches cause a problem.

i hardly had problems with windows explorer. it what i am most used too.
i also have had hardly any problems with the indexing service. it eats some resources
but not a whole lot and usually during idle time.

i am sure that there is a registry key/ switch that would eliminate this pop up

i am not on a vista machine right now but i found this on an xp machine
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\MSIDXS ErrorLookup

dunno if that's it

BoT,

Tried it, not it. Still haven't found anything, so if anybody ever does figure it out, post away. I'd like to know.

Well, I created a bit of a workaround-slash-crappy-hack. I began to wonder when I did a search, what was Explorer doing to determine if the Indexing service was running.

Turns out all it does is look to see if a service (any service really) named wsearch (the indexer service) is running. If so, ok. If not, nag my face off.

So all I did was delete the original Indexing service, replaced it with a dummy service named wsearch, started the dummy service and blamo! No more nag screens, and no more indexer eating up 50-100MB of memory! Yay!

way to go, i'll say. i probably would have just renamed the indexing service instead of deleted it
but hey what ever works.

Well, monkeyballz ... I found a downside to this.

When I have my service running, everytime I try to rename or delete a file, I think Explorer is trying to notify the indexer ... because it thinks it's running -- but my dummy program doesn't understand what it's saying (or won't issue a proper response), so the whole system freezes. That's an ever bigger mess than I had before.

Oh well ... back to square one.