Windows 7 Quick Tip: Turn Windows Search Function On or Off

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Windows 7
Windows 7

Do you find the inbuilt search functionality of Windows 7 to be too slow and ineffective? Do you want to turn off Windows Search and Indexing on Windows 7? In this post we shall learn how to quickly turn off or turn on Windows Search function, in addition to looking at a few quick and efficient desktop search programs for Windows 7.

The native Windows Search utility is quite useful in finding folders, documents and programs on the computer. You can access it from the Start Menu  as well as in the top right corner of all Windows Explorer windows. Windows indexes all the files and folders included in the search index settings, and uses this database to quickly return search results. However, despite having an index, the searches are usually slow and inefficient, especially when you frequently add and modify files and programs.

If you do not use the Windows Search functionality often, you could simply turn it off using the following steps:

How to Turn Off Windows Search on Windows 7

  • Go to Control Panel through the Desktop icon, from the Start Menu or Computer.
  • Click on Programs.
  • Under Programs and Features, click on “Turn Windows Features On/Off”
  • In the window that opens, deselect Windows Search and click on OK to save the change.

 If after a few days or weeks you feel the need to turn on Windows Search, follow the same procedure except you need to select Windows Search instead, and then click on OK to save the change.

Alternatively, if you do search for stuff regularly, you could turn off Windows Search and use a free and fast desktop search utility like Everything Search instead, which typically takes less than a minute to return thousands of results. You can read about it in this post by Justin: Best Search Application for Windows 7 (https://www.dragonblogger.com/search-application-windows-7/)

Some other alternatives are:

http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/home/download.html

  • Locate32

http://locate32.net/content/view/18/31/

http://desktop.google.com/

 

Please let us know if you found the Windows 7 Tip useful and share other useful search utilities.

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.