My laptop has been running super slow and I noticed in Task Manager that the disk is constantly at 100% usage. Turns out it's Windows Search indexing in the background. I've tried pausing it but it keeps coming back. What's the proper way to disable this without breaking Windows?
You can safely disable Windows Search without breaking anything - just right-click the Windows Search process in Task Manager and select "End task," then go to Services (services.msc) and find "Windows Search," set it to Disabled, and apply. If you still want some search functionality, you can instead exclude folders you don't need indexed (like Downloads or external drives) through the indexing options in Settings, which usually fixes the 100% disk problem. Just know you'll lose the quick file search in the Start menu if you disable it entirely, but your system will run noticeably smoother.
Disabling it via Services is the right move, but just ending the task in Task Manager won't stick since it'll restart on reboot - you need to actually change the service settings. Open services.msc, find "Windows Search," right-click it and set the startup type to "Disabled" instead of "Automatic." Before you do that though, is your indexing actually stuck on a particular folder or just running constantly even after it's had time to complete? Sometimes it gets caught in a loop if there's a corrupted file or a network drive acting weird, and in those cases disabling it entirely might be overkill when you could just fix what's triggering it.
The services.msc approach is definitely the way to go, but if you want to keep search functionality without the constant indexing headache, try limiting what gets indexed instead of killing it entirely. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Search Permissions and uncheck "Enhance search results" and disable indexing for folders you don't actually need searched (like Downloads or temp folders). This often cuts the disk thrashing in half while keeping basic file search working.
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