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Viewing Travel with Laptops: How to Turn off Windows Search ServiceTravel with Laptops: How to Turn off Windows Search Service
By Kathy Steinemann
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You want to check e-mails between flights, but Windows insists on indexing your drive in the background while you work. Sadly, your battery is getting low. Pressing F1 for help gets you nowhere. However, the search index CAN be disabled. Here is how. You only have a few minutes to catch up on e-mails between flights. Windows decides it wants to index your drive "in the background" while you work. However, your battery is getting low, and you worry about all that extra drive activity draining it. Pressing F1 for help gets you nowhere. Clicking on the question, "Can I turn the Windows search index on or off?" brings up a help file claiming that users with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 can pause the index for 15 minutes at a time. Unfortunately, Windows Vista insists that you cannot disable the index. However, the information is incorrect. You CAN immobilize this annoying behavior. Using the search function when you need it causes a bit of hard drive churning, you find what you want, and then your drive settles down while you continue with what you were doing. The amount of drain on your laptop's resources is very little compared to the beating it gets with constant indexing and re-indexing of files. Here is how to turn the index off. Although the instructions presented in this article are specifically targeted at Windows Vista, you should be able to perform similar steps to accomplish the task in other versions of Windows as well. 1. Click on the "Start" button and select the following: "Settings" - "Control Panel" - "Administrative Tools" - "Services" OR (faster way) Press CTRL-ALT-DELETE - select "Start Task Manager" - and click on "Services" near the bottom right hand corner of the window. 2. Scroll down until you see "Windows Search", right click, and select "Properties". 3. Under the "General" tab, in the bottom part of the window, click on "Stop" to halt the service. 4. Still in the "General" tab, in the middle of the window, change "Startup type" to "disabled". 5. Click on "OK" to close the tab, close the Services window - and you're done! If you should ever decide that you want to re-enable Windows search, change the startup type back to its default setting. This Windows behavior annoys millions of people worldwide, and it is incredibly easy to stop! (c) Copyright Kathy Steinemann: This article is free to publish only if this copyright notice, the byline, and the author's note below (with active links) are included. About the Author: Kathy enjoys writing travel articles for travel sites like 111 Travel Directory and contributing travel tips to 1000tips4trips. She also writes articles for 1stRateArticles. Article source: 111 Travel Directory: Triple1.com (triple one dot com) More free articles: 1st Rate Articles - 1stRateArticles.com |
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