Can one imagine an online life without search? Imagine not having the assistance of searching when you are looking for information! Imagine the phrase seek and ye shall find was never coined! Well, my worklife is gonna be somewhat like that from tomorrow onwards!
Why? you may ask…
Coz I was fed up of that pesky little thing that is called Search Indexer and was forcibly foisted upon me as part of XP SP3 
The good old search companion was good enough for my needs but this pesky search indexer is one hell of a memory hog! It eats up valuable RAM and also indexes every goddamn file that is there on the PC! Couldn’t it ask me at first which filetypes/folders/drives to index? Yes, there are the so-called advanced options that I can set so that it behaves exactly how I want it to but those settings aren’t shown to me initially! I ‘discover’ them just a few days back when I started getting low disk-space errors and investigations revealed several .mdb files sitting cosily within the search application data folder…each nearly two gigs in size!
Aghast (and swearing under my breath!), I proceeded to uninstall it from the Add/Remove Programs but voila! it was running as a service and not as an installed program! So I did the first thing that came to my mind – fire up services.msc and stop the search service (and also make the startup as manual)! The full implication of that dawned on me just a while ago and I may yet have to restart it and let it run, just in order to make my computing life easier by allowing me to search…but not before I cut short the list of filetypes & the locations to index. It may not be beaten but at least can be subdued!
P.S: I’m looking for ways to get rid of that pesky thing once and for all and stick to the trusty search companion. Let me know in the comments if you know/come across any helpful information. Tx.
