Microsoft Forces Desktop Search On Windows Update

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that the blogosphere is alight with accusations of Microsoft forcing Windows Desktop Search on networks via the 'automatic install' feature of Windows Update — even if they had configured their systems not to use the program. Once installed, the search program began diligently indexing C drives and entire networks slowed to a crawl."

Comments

Re:Enough with the stealth auto-"updates" dammit!

[should_be_linear]

You are crying loud, but nobody is listening. I was user of MS products and dev tools until 2004 and always thought how great it would be if I could submit this or that bug to some bugzilla. But I can't. Unless your problem is visible to Joe Sixpack (like Excel's calculation), MS don't really care.

This is main reason why I think that MS dev tools like VS.NET simply cannot compete with open source NetBeans/Eclipse. I always get to some corner cases where I need author or real expert, someone that understand source code of the product, to assist me with my issue. And I never achieved that with MS products.

Re:What's worse...

[costas]

Now, forcing WDS down users' throats is beyond the pale, but saying that GDS is better is just false: WDS has a better UI than GDS (and not just because it's an actual Windows app), does a much, much better job indexing mail than GDS (it can actually handle mail being moved between folders and indexes attachments just fine) and has better indexing behavior: it deals with moved/deleted documents better and its index doesn't grow out of proportions like GDS', nor does it seem to 'forget' documents.

On the other hand, WDS daemon may eat a bit more CPU at times, it doesn't index Firefox histories and obviously doesn't integrate with Google's web search, which is the only killer GDS feature as far as I am concerned.

Admittedly, the above is based on my experience with GDS ~12 months ago: I switched to WDS and never looked back. I'd be happy to give Google another shot if they've improved their product.

Re:Similarly as Beagle....

[nschubach]

Why does lsass have to continue running after you log into your PC and generate your key? It simply doesn't make sense for a login service to remain running. You should be able to shut it off and thus further disallow people from logging into your PC. This is nothing like "killing the kernel on Linux."