don't install windows desktop search

It was a nice Wednesday morning, yesterday, when I got a little alert from the Windows Automatic Updates on my task bar. I usually check what Microsoft wants to install before I install it. Well, this time it was the Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP. I thought, "What real harm can come from installing this?". Most of the people I work with have the Google Desktop Search installed on their PCs and laptops anyway.

So I said, download and install. BIG MISTAKE!!! It was quick to install, but then came the indexing. The indexing took over half a day to do. It indexed something like 140,000 files on my machine. I didn't know I had that many Word docs, etc., that I needed to be able to search for. While it was indexing, my machine slowed way down. Now I do local development on my machine and run no less than two ColdFusion instances at one time, sometimes more. So, I need all the resources I can get, and with the indexing running, it took away the memory and processor power I need!

Well, to be a good sport, I let the index continue to run and it finally stopped right before I went home for the day. When I got home, I booted up my laptop again and noticed things were again lagging. So, I did some digging and found that the Windows Desktop Search was still running and indexing my machine! Still!! Even though I turned it off on start up, it was still running in the background, hogging up resources on my machine. Rrrr.

I had an answer for that! I found I could uninstall the program via the Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs. I did remove it and everything was back to normal. Now, just this morning as I booted up my laptop, Windows said it had some more updates for me. And you can about guess what it was!! Yup, Windows Desktop Search. I unchecked the checkbox next to it in the Update Manager, and then it prompts me to say I really don't want to install this program. And then I have to tell it again, NOT to notify me of this update again.

Microsoft must be really pushing this because they are upset that Google can do a better job at searching a hard drive than they can, even on their own operating system. So, my advice to everyone is not to install the Windows Desktop Search, but to install a proven desktop search in Google Desktop Search. Lesson learned.