growled on Thursday, October 20, 2005 1:07:26 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
barked at microsoft
I'm sorry to say that I've just uninstalled the MSN Search Toolbar.  Why?
  • Consistently uses 100+ MB of RAM.
  • Slows down overall performance of my machine (even switching from IE to Outlook hangs after my machine has been up for awhile).
  • Typing in applications skips letters I input, for example "breakfast" will end up being "brkft" in Word. And I'm no speed demon typist either!
  • All of these symptoms go away when I kill the WindowsDesktopSearch.exe process. My PC starts acting normal again.
  • Honestly, I only found myself using it once every 3 or 4 weeks so I just don't seem to need it. [shrug]
Yes, I had indexing set to only run while I was not actively using my PC, which in my mind [and I think that of "Joe User"] would mean that it should take very little resources unless it's indexing or I'm actively searching.  Apparently that isn't the case.  Even Visual Studio .NET 2003 [a noted RAM hog] uses less RAM than the WindowsDesktopSearch process! 
 
I sincerely hope it gets better, but I cannot cripple the performance of my work machine for a product that I don't even use very much.  I would love if this process used only 5-10 MB of RAM while it's running in the background!  I would certainly leave it installed if that were the case.
 
 
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