Windows Desktop Search - Half Baked, Half Assed
I love the ability to search fast through OneNote and Outlook that Windows Desktop Search gives me... but...
And here's the problem. But. It's a huge but. It's an enormous but. If it had an extra t, it'd need to buy an extra seat whenever it flew.
It makes my machine run like porridge.
I don't know what it is. I disabled it scanning XML files because the XML parser runs like molasses on a cold day in January. But It Still Regularly Slows My Machine To A Crawl.
Here's a clue, Windows Desktop Search team:
I don't know what kind of uber monster machines you're running, but most people's systems these days slow down considerably whenever they hit the disk. I don't know if it's the chipsets being used, or the drivers, but nearly every machine I've seen slows to a crawl when it hits high disk utilization these days - including Quad Core, 4Gb monster machines like my system at work.
Laptops are worse. Most laptops I've seen can't handle sustained high throughput on any IO channel - USB or hard drive. It just kills them. They slow to a crawl and become unresponsive.
LIMIT YOUR DISK ACCESS. I don't care if you're in an idle thread, you can't hammer the disk the way you do.
Fix it, or bye-bye WDS. I have no idea if Google Search is any better; I uninstalled that puppy when it was still buggy enough to cause problems and crash on a regular basis. Either way, it won't provide the search functions I need in Outlook and OneNote.
Simon Cooke is an occasional video game developer, ex-freelance journalist, screenwriter, film-maker, musician, and software engineer in Seattle, WA.
The views posted on this blog are his and his alone, and have no relation to anything he's working on, his employer, or anything else and are not an official statement of any kind by them (and barely even one by him most of the time).