How to Speed up Start Menu Search on Vista

Posted by ilan

July 8, 2008

When you feel a notably delay on your Vista Search, you can Speed-Up Windows Vista’s Start Menu Search using following fix. Windows Vista automatically searches the file index as well and this causes significant delay especially when you have tons of filed in your hard disk. The file index can be quite large because it includes all the files on your hard drive. One way to speed-up searching in your Start Menu applications is to narrow the scope of the search so that it does not include files on the hard drive:

Method 1: Registry Hack

1. Open registry editor using regedit.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer and select Advanced.
3. Find and right-click on Start_SearchFiles and select Modify.
4. Set the Value to 0.
5. Restart the Explorer.exe process or reboot the computer.

Method 2: Start Button

1. Right-click on the Start Button and select Properties.
2. Click on the Customize button.
3. Uncheck Search Communications.
4. Set Search Files to Don’t Search for files.
5. Click OK.

Windows