How to disable Windows Desktop Search and revert to search companion

If Microsoft have pushed you into using desktop search as part of running office 2007 instead of search companion and you work on a network, you will have rapidly discovered how useless and time wasting it is.

If you have connections to a number of network drives and don’t want to have the index service chugging away chewing up up space and wasting resources, or you have not specifically said the network drive to be indexed when you go to search profile you will get the message this folder is not indexed as shown below:

You then have to click on search companion to actually search for folder.

You can either click on options from here and add all of your network drive to get indexed and then wait for it to occur, or better yet turn WDS off.

To turn it off run RegEdit (hit Start > Run then type ‘regedit’). Go to the following node: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

Then double-click on ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ and set the value to ‘0’.

Close that and you’re done, the next time you click ‘Search’ in explorer, the old, reliable search companion will appear.

This applies to operating systems before Windows Vista, since Vista has far better search that actually works.