Fast Search / excessive HD activity (XP)

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Thanks for the great info and detail!

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Hi,

I searched the forums for previous posts on this problem, but didn’t find anything, nor did I find anything on Woody’s Web site. My problem is excessive hard drive activity after a few minutes of no keyboard or mouse input. In this case, “excessive” means that the hard drive continues to chatter until I press a key or move the mouse. I let it run one night to see how long it would chatter, and I finally got tired of listening to it and shut it down after 3 hours.

Anxious to find the solution to the problem, I fired up my copy of TaskInfo2000 2.2 (which is available from <http://www.iarsn.com/index.html#/download.html>). This gem of a utility lets me see what apps are using my CPU time. I noticed that after the hard drive activity began, a new program appeared on the list — “mosearch.exe”. I assumed the title stood for “Microsoft Office Search,” so I ran the OXP setup program.

With Setup running, I clicked “Add or Remove Features,” and under “Office Tools,” I found “Support for Fast Searching,” which was enabled to “Run from My Computer.” I changed the status to “Not Available,” and all my problems as described above stopped. Now, I have no idea if MOSEARCH has the same effect on all computers, or just some of them, but it definitely appears to me that something isn’t right.

BTW, my version of OXP is “Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage,” version 10.2614.2625. This may even be fixed in a later version of OXP, but I thought I’d make the post in case anyone else has had this problem.

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Mr.MathType,

FindFast was its Office 97 name, and basically no matter what version of Office, even the one coming out after XP, I wouldn’t install it at all. FastSearch isn’t worth bothering using. If your IT folks have installed it, I would either ask them to remove it, or uninstall it yourself. This indexing feature is not worth the problems which you can see affected quite a few loungers in the postings on Office 97.

That was one of only two office features that never made it onto our training machines while I was a trainer, the other was the Office Shortcut Bar, kind of unnecessary with the start menu, and it is a resource pig.

FWIW

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Thanks for the info Tom. I never found much use for Find Fast either, but didn’t realize it would cause this kind of problem. As to the shortcut bar… well, MS didn’t ask you and me, did they? (I don’t like it either.)

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find fast is really only useful for networked drives, if you have a standalone machine or store all docs local, you really don’t need it.

it’s been a well known issue since Office97 was released, you don’t get out enough.

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Just as an aside to this… anybody using AutoCAD who hasn’t removed Find Fast, or MS Search from their computer should do so.

You’ll find that AutoCAD normally freezes after working on one drawing file, and attempting to open a second one, if Find Fast or MS Search is active.

Just my .

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Thanks, Bob, for the excellent post. I have had this problem after installing Office XP Professional on my stand-alone machine. Remembering the problem with O97 and Fast Find, I started looking for the place to turn it off. I finally did as you suggested and marked “Support for Fast Searching” as not available. However, I notice that somehow a folder is created on one of my HD partitions which looks like it is for this function. I have deleted the folder and subdirectories, but after restarting the computer it is back again. Any idea where I can turn this feature off completely?

Whit Crowley

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Whit you asked, “Any idea where I can turn this feature off completely?” What worked for me was to run the Office XP Setup again, select Add/Remove Features, and under Office Tools, the last item is “Support for Fast Searching.” Mark it as “Not Available.”

(Sorry to take so long to respond.)

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Thanks, Bob. After doing some more research, I found that this feature can be turned on and off through Word XP using the Search panel. It is a shame that MS did not make it more apparent. –Whit

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when you search, start with all ms products, not a specific one. if oyu get too many hits and hte first page isn’t a help use more keywords or try a specific product.

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