Do you have a process that won’t die? Tired of searchindexer.exe calling you at home to harrass you for the rent? Do you have credit card debt?
Your solution is here! OK, what you want to do to prevent searchindexer.exe (searchprotocolhost.exe) from spawning everytime some MS product loads, just follow these simple steps:
- Start > Run
- Enter ’services.msc’ and hit Enter.
- Find ‘Windows Search’
- Punch the screen (just kidding)
- Double-click (on the Win Search item)
- Set ‘Start-up type’ to ‘Manual’.
- Click the ‘Stop’ button if it is enabled (because that means the service is running)
- Click the ‘Log On’ tab
- Select each hardware profile item on the list, one at a time, and click ‘Disable’ for each one.
That should stop it from running without hacking your system to bits. Now, I have to say that I have NO IDEA what this is going to do to the searchability of your MS products. I mean, if Outlook is firing it up, it must be indexing your e-mail with it or something, so who knows what effects it could have ultimately. But in the mean time, enjoy the CPU time you’ll save, which I believe translates to energy savings as well. It must, right?
If I’m wrong, educate me.
Nice
Im also contributing to powersaving efforts by disabling microsoft perversions.
I found out that the “searchindexer.exe” file comes to XP when you install WINDOWS DESKTOP SEARCH.
However, this article WAS EXCELLENT
The best I could tell, even totally disabling the process AND unchecking the box on C:’s properties window that allows indexing of the drive didn’t slow searchindexer down for me. I went to the Windows/system32 folder and renamed the file. It’s working so far (except for an error message during bootup!).
It worked. Thank you.
This solution worked for me…thanks
I follow the steps to stop the searchindexer.exe from executing follwoing your instruction but it keep coming back. I am on Windows Server 2003. Any suggestion?
Thanks
@martiini: nice.
@micky: glad you liked it.
@david: ok - that works!
@robert: you’re welcome.
@judy: nice.
@yoav: I don’t have a server to test it on. When you go into Services (Start > Run > ’services.msc’ and find the Windows Search item, does it say ‘Manual’ for the startup type? If not, try the procedure again. If it still continues to plague you, then Win2k3 must be switching it back on somehow. And if that’s the case, then my question to Microsoft is: “What’s the point of Administrative Tools, then?”
Good luck!
Thanks for posting the quick and easy solution.
My pleasure!