Here's an issue for the experts...

I just noticed that when I do a Search from my Windows 7 Start Menu, all of the email messages matching the search terms are listed twice: Once under the header of "Microsoft Outlook", and once under "Microsoft Office Outlook". Does anyone know where in the registry this might be misconfigured? How can I get rid of one of the two groups (doesn't matter which one)?

P.S.: I have a hunch this is related to the fact that at one point I had Office 2007 installed (at which point Outlook was called "Microsoft Office Outlook 2007"), and later I upgraded to Office 2010 (where Outlook's full name is "Microsoft Outlook 2010"). So this might be a residue of the previous installation. The question is, how do I get rid of this residue?

 

Have you tried deleting the search index file and let Windows rebuild it?

 

^^^ Good idea, when you upgraded to Office 2010 did you uninstall Office 2007?

 

Right, click START > SEARCH, then click INDEX OPTIONS

and remove the one you don't want, or if there is not an option for removing the one outlook, go to ADVANCED, then click the REBUILD button

 

No, this issue has nothing to do with the Search Indexer, its settings, or the index itself. It turns out that the answer is quite interesting: My issue is caused by duplicate copies of the Search Connectors the two versions of Office had installed. Removing the old versions fixed the problem. In the process, however, I found out that the "Federated Search" capability introduced with Windows 7 is really a very cool feature. See here for a taste of additional search capabilities you can add to Windows 7. I wonder if this would work in Windows 8 as well.

 

Yet I have read many posts about the search indexing in Win 7 (and previous) causing slowdowns when doing video rendering so I have tried to stop all indexing.

 

I have never seen any such report that was correct. In Windows 7, search indexing is just about as un-noticeable as it gets. Most of the people complaining about system load from indexing simply don't know what they are talking about. Quite often, people take the initial indexing run, which indeed can take a long time, as indicative of the system load imposed by indexing, and turn it off without ever giving the system a chance to set itself up properly. I have of the order of 150,000 items indexed on my machine, and if I set up a new computer with that kind of volume, creating that initial index will typically take a few hours. However, once that index is created, the additional overhead to update the index for new and chnaged files is entirely negligible. There is simply no way, period, that anybody would be able to notice that.

There is one important exception to what I just said, however: Quite a few software developers ship their software with shoddy iFilters that plug into Win7's indexing system. If you have an iFilter that crashes and/or hangs, then you may see issues with system load through the indexing system. The system still tries to terminate such processes, but if the iFilter hogs the CPU while it is failing, you will see an impact on system performance.

 

On a normally functioning machine, I have yet to see an issue with indexing in Windows 7, either--however, I will add the caveat that is for NORMALLY FUNCTIONING machines. Not too long ago, I ran into a machine where the system was running very poorly. Furthermore, search results were either slow, non-existent, or strange. Best guess, the index had become corrupt. Rebuilt the index and let it rebuild and all was better