Categories: System Configuration

How to Enable / Disable Windows Search service

‘Windows Search’ helps to find files, programs and emails easily on the computer. To use this, we just need to click on start button and start typing the search words in the search box. This feature is enabled by Windows Search service, which indexes the files on the computer for a faster search experience.

If you are not going to use Windows search feature, then  you can disable the service permanently. Open administrator command prompt and run the below command.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sc config WSearch start= disabled
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS
C:\WINDOWS\system32>

To enable windows search, we can run the below command.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sc config WSearch start= auto
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Disable windows search for specific items

Windows search can index files, emails in Outlook and items and also browsing history from Internet explorer. Search for these items can be configured separately.

    • Click on start button
    • Type ‘Indexing options’

    • Click on Modify.


Here you can select/deselect the folders/categories for enabling or disabling search.

Srini

View Comments

  • I don't save files locally, I do them on a network drive connected to the server as M: \
    I can't find a way for Windows Search to search that drive.
    There should be an option the index box or via Regedit, but I can't find it.

Recent Posts

Add new user account from command line (CMD)

Adding users from command line is much easier than going through the UI. It saves…

4 years ago

Delete directory from command line [Rmdir]

Do you want to delete a directory from Windows command prompt(CMD)? This post explains how…

4 years ago

TaskKill: Kill process from command line (CMD)

We can kill a process from GUI using Task manager. If you want to do…

4 years ago

Kill Chrome from command line

Chrome is definitely the stable browser compared to other ones and it has been my…

4 years ago

Find windows OS version from command line

Windows has multiple command line utilities that can help find the version of the Windows…

4 years ago

How to check if Windows 32 or 64 bit?

There are multiple ways to check whether a Windows computer is running 32-bit OS or…

7 years ago