After many months of using Windows Desktop Search I un-installed it. Why? Well it started with my new little Fujitsu Lifebook P7120. I never installed Desktop Search on it cause I was afraid of the overhead. Plus it’s just so darn speedy I didn’t want to slow it down and I suspected that Desktop Search manifests itself via lots of “overhead”.
However, I didn’t want to lose out on fast search in Outlook. So I just installed LookOut. It’s still out there and works just great. See the problem with Desktop Search is that it puts its hooks everywhere (it hooks into the Explorer, bunch of system processes, Outlook, and so on… it even replaces the super slow but reliable built in XP search assistant that I use all the time to find things in a specific folder). All I want is to find my email quickly and till Outlook 12 ships with its new fast search, I’m stuck with Outlook 2003’s slow search. I keep my filesystem organized, and use programs such as SlickRun and AppRocket to open folders and launch applications so I don’t need the file system indexer as much.
Anyway, I un-installed WDS from my home desktop. My memory footprint went down about 100 MB. Since WDS runs in other OS processes in addition to having it’s own, it’s my opinion that this just slows things down and causes general instability (just watching it go in FileMon and RegMon will make your head spin). I realize that this is a broad generalized statement to make, but I just grew tired of suspecting it of causing my instability. I’ll wait for Vista before where I hope the Search issue gets solved better.
So for now, I’m back to what I was using over a year ago, and it’s much more lightweight which meets my needs. Nothing against the great folks that work on this product; I was on the dogfood train for a VERY long time helping to test the product. I look forward to using their technology in Vista.