For the past week or so, my hard drive had suddenly started to work overtime i.e. it was constantly active as if scanning for something. My CPU utilization was getting maxed out (close to 100%) and my whole operating system became extremely slow/ sluggish.

At first I thought that it was my Anti virus software scanning my computer but it wasn’t the case as the unexpected activity went on for days. Shutting down any open applications, Outlook and my Firefox browser didn’t do the trick. Rebooting didn’t do it either.

Evidently (according to a number of articles in the MSDN forum), the problem points to a bug within Microsoft Vista. The hard drive activity and high utilization is related to the Windows Search and Indexing service.

Here is the temporary unofficial fix:

1) Disable Windows Search services (within the Services area i.e. by going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services).
or/and
2) Disable the .XML file extension from being indexed in the Indexing Options control panel (this was a reply from a Microsoft Support person within the forum)

I did disable the search but didn’t try fix #2. My computer is currently back to normal CPU utilization and everything seems fine.

I do have some questions though:

- does this bug occur on specific Vista versions only?
- what triggers the search service to overload the computer?
- when does the Windows Search service start? Randomly or periodically?
- what extra Vista functionality am I losing by disabling Windows Search and Indexing service?

My computer is brand new (less than a month old), running an unpatched Vista Ultimate operating system and is a Dell XPS (if it makes any difference). I am also wondering why this problem suddenly occurred within the past two weeks.

Hope this problem is fixed within Vista’s Service Pack 1. For now, this article may help those suddenly encountering a (Vista) CPU overload.