Comments on: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

By: Karl

Karl — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Yep, I was just curious today as to why Desktop Search was not working on my PC. I have the old indexing service disabled, and I HAD the index flag unslected on many of my folders. As mentioned above, Desktop Search will honor those settings, so you need to allow indexing for it to work. However, you DO NOT need to enable the old Indexing Service. Just confirming what Brandon said above, thanks.

By: Kirk M

Kirk M — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:45:02 +0000

Brandon,

That would explain the problem then. I’ll give it another go then. Perhaps I missed it but these parameters didn’t seemed to be listed in the requirements or FAQ’s on the MS website for Desktop Search.

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

By: Brandon Paddock

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:57:24 +0000

Indexing Service should definitely be disabled. Running both is not a supported configuration and known to cause problems.

They do both honor the “Not content indexed” flag on drives / folders / files, which is probably why you were unable to choose that drive for indexing.

By: Kirk M

Kirk M — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:15:11 +0000

Thanks for the info. Although I know the workings of my OS fairly well perhaps I did something wrong then. I had disabled the indexing service long ago for just that reason and my C: drive was set not to be indexed. It seems I had to enable both before WDS would index anything at all or let me choose what folders I wished to add to the index but maybe just enabling the C: drive to be indexed allowed WDS to work then rather than enabling XP’s indexing service?

Oh, and I have a fully updated XP PRO with .net 1,2 and 3 installed and not a whole lot of extra software. Ilike to keep things fairly pure.

Sorry if this comment is a bit off topic but in the above case, when using WDS should the normal XP indexing service be enabled or disabled?

By: Brandon Paddock

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:52:05 +0000

Kirk – WDS has a very tiny resource footprint, and definitely won’t make your hard drive I/O any greater while you’re using the computer. WDS, by default, only indexes when your system is idle (no mouse + keyboard usage, low CPU usage, and low disk I/O). WDS was designed to run well on much older systems than what you described (tons of enterprises running it on 1ghz 512MB machines, for example). Tests have shown the impact on system performance is roughly the same as Copernic, and less than GDS.

If you are experiencing any noticeable impact on performance, it is likely you’re encountering a compatibility issue. Otherwise, it’s probably something other than WDS causing the problem.

Further, the XP built-in Indexing Service *did* cause disk trashing, largely because it didn’t back-off on user activity, though also because it’s a much older version of the indexing technology and not optimized for desktop use.

WDS does NOT depend on the built-in Indexing Service.

By: Kirk M

Kirk M — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:08:49 +0000

Okay, so Photo Gallery is dependent on Desktop Search and it’s not blatantly advertised that this is so. Not good but typical. MS taking advantage of the “average user” that really doesn’t check things out thoroughly before downloading. Another real problem here is that Desktop Search is a resource hog when it shouldn’t be. It also is constantly banging on your hard drive so much it never seems to stop being accessed (default settings). This never happens with XP’s normal indexing service activated (which Desktop Search is dependant on so why the difference? Copernic doesn’t do this.).

Perhaps folks with dual core PC’s with 2 GB of memory don’t experince this problem (running XP) however the majority of PC owners are still (currently) running single core processor’s with 1GB of RAM or less and having Desktop Search installed when it’s not obvious to the user is definately a problem. As usual, MS needs to be more up front with their requirements for new software.

A long time MS OS/software user.

By: Brandon Paddock

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:59:00 +0000

Regarding the Live Photo Gallery issue you mentioned – that’s still a BETA offering right? Perhaps you should clarify that in your post, as the user experience there is not final.

Further, Photo Gallery has a technical dependency on the Windows Search property system – which is only redistributed to XP via WDS. It’s definitely not trying to “sneak” anything anywhere, it just needs that in order to function on a pre-Vista system. Countless applications do this with DirectX, XMLLite, SQLLite, MSDE, hotfixes, .NET Framework, C++ runtimes, etc. Though I agree that the user experience here needs work, I wouldn’t call it a “violation” of your computer for an application to install a system update that it depends on.

Also – if you install Photo Gallery by itself, is the experience better? Perhaps this is just an issue with the combined Live Installer tool?