Unpausing Vista's Indexing
The indexing service for Vista (and XP as a separate programme) is, in theory, a good tool just hit the Start and tap in what you're looking for and up it pops. In practice it can be a right pain when it decides to miss stuff out because there's no other way of easily searching for things. I've tried to do a quick and dirty backup of all files I've worked on this week and it happily misses off things I've done either yesterday or even today. I name things such as "logorugby" and it can't find them in a search for "rugby".
So when that happens it's time to rebuild the index. For that you locate Indexing Services hit Advanced and Rebuild. But what if the index is running at the time, what if you want to do some advanced tinkering? Well the logical thing would be to hit the Pause button.
So you do your thing and hit rebuild and a box comes up complaining that "Indexing is Paused" okay I'll unpause it... wait I can't. Yep Microsoft in their wisdom has allowed you to pause a service with no means of restarting it.
What to do? Well you could restart the computer, but that's a bit harsh instead head back to the Start Menu and type Services. Run that and you'll see a full list of all the background operations find "Windows Search" and Stop it, then Start it. That's it indexing will be functional. Pathetic isn't it.
[Update - in both Windows Vista & 7 it's possible to choose "Restart" instead. Thank you to NakiBest (Unknown) in the comments]
10 comments:
Oh yes.. pathetic indeed! Thanks :D
WTF?? What's wrong with Microsoft? Don't they have a QA department full of people who have tasks they want to accomplish like troubleshooting indexing? W .... T ........... F???
Well remember that Vista was going to have an entirely new file system called WinFS that was going to be one big relational database. That got scrapped so this indexing was kind of dropped in as a replacement; which explains (but doesn't excuse) why it doesn't work well.
Good news! Windows 7 is now out and of course this problem has been fixed! No, wait, no chance - that would explain why I am commenting on this rant when it is 2011 and I am running Windows 7! Hard to believe they still prosper isn't it?
When it's something this fundamental to the OS, yes it is hard to believe.
I've yet to get my hands on 7. Those I know who have seem to prefer it to Vista, but I hardly get an enthusiastic report out of them.
Well, it turns out it's because you don't need to unpause it! Without any mention that it's going to restart, indexing resumes after 15 minutes!
Wonderful! Does the Indexing Options dialogue box give any indication of this? Not a chance!
I only found out by following other leads from my original google of the problem.
Incidentally, I quite like Windows 7 generally, other than the plethora of issues like this which Microsoft build into every one of their operating systems to make work for their army of technicians!
Hmm is that For both Vista and 7 I wonder?
"I quite like Windows 7 generally" yes that's the type of ringing endorsement I've been hearing :-P
I got that from a reply to a Vista blog; however, the respondent was quoting the help from Windows 7.
The big plus for W7 over Vista is the improved UAC - not so many prompts and if you approve a task it doesn't force you to then approve every @#$%% sub-task.
Performance wise, it seems to use memory better and runs happily on 1GB RAM.
The desktop also has some nice touches including pinning programs to the taskbar and then pinning items to the program's jumplist.
After six months I prefer it to XP and wouldn't go back now. :)
@Dagrate: Re: 15 minutes and no indiciation. While it's not much help to most people(because who doesn't Google before anything else?), it's atleast not entirely undocumented. The 15 minute restart is mentioned in the built in Windows help for the Indxing Options dialog.
....Run that and you'll see a full list of all the background operations find "Windows Search" and Stop it, then Start it....
Not sure about Vista, but on Windows 7 there is also a "Restart" menu item, no need to Stop and Start. :)
But the requirement to run the Services console to un-pause this is really stupid, I agree!
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