Jamie Le Souef

I’m a bit of a fan of office 2007. I like the ribon tool bar and the countless other improvments that Microsoft have made to the Office suite. I also use Outlook 2007. Outlook 2007 I’ve been quite dissapointed with. They don’t seem to have fixed any of the issues that plauged 2003 but a review of Office 2007 and it’s contents is for another day.

Anyone who has installed Outlook 2007 knows that you need to install Microsoft Desktop Search 3 with it in order to quickly search your email.

Before you all jump up and down screaming about Google Desktop don’t worry. I use it religiously to search my stupid amount of Backup Hard Drives for all my precious content. But I don’t like using it in Outlook. Too many seperate windows. In My Option Desktop Search 3 is better then Google Desktop in Outlook 07.

But how the F*&^ did they stuff up the indexing of files!? How is it that Google does such a brillient job of indexing my PC and Microsoft’s software designed to run on Microsofts OS can’t even find it’self!?

Not only can’t it find anything but it also replaces the decent working Search Companion…

It’s time to remove that and bring back the Good ol’ dog (I’ve actualy removed that dog as it was very anoying. Tweak XP has a nice setting to use the classic search in Explorer - still the best search tool Microsoft has made… how sad)

Here is how you bring back the Dog or the Clasic search in Explorer:

Open RegEdit (Start > Run > regedit).

Find the following : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

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

Happy searching.

Related Posts

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• November 15, 2007 -- PC Mag : The Vista Death Watch
• August 22, 2007 -- Remove Vista from Dual Boot
• July 6, 2007 -- Say goodbye to Vista – Say goodbye my baby…
• September 20, 2008 -- about

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are 4 Responses to “ Change Windows Desktop Search to Search Companion ”

1

Peter Raymond Says

It’s actually HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, not HKEY_CURRENT_USER. At least, that’s how it is on my test box, a default Windows XP installation.

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July 30th, 2008 at 8:14 am

2

Jamie Le Souef Says

Thanks for that Peter. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the copy of windows that i changed the above settings on wasn’t fresh, but it defiantly was located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

I’ll have a look on at both locations and see if they both can do the same thing.

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July 30th, 2008 at 8:55 am

3

Alan Says

Our administrators have prevented access to regedit. Is their a way to bring up Windows Explorer (like from the command line) with Search Companion enabled?

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August 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 am

4

Jamie Le Souef Says

Unfortunately i don’ know of a way to do it, or if it can be done at all. The Desktop search enables itself in the registry. Maybe speak with your admin and see if they can change the setting for you.

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August 2nd, 2008 at 10:45 am

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