Wednesday, February 22, 2012

High CPU Usage for SearchIndexer.exe (Windows Search Service)

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproperf/thread/b73b6db7-117f-4985-8c53-9cb610173b1d

A Dell system running Windows 7 Pro was constantly freezing and showing high process utilization spikes for the searchindexer.exe process. 15-20% while the system was in use. Resmon showed the high CPU usage, but the disk tab didn't show any disk activity from that process. It turned out that the search indexer was constantly trying to index files in C:\Users\Public\Dell\UCM. This is a universal connection manager utility included with Dell systems. In the indexing options in control panel, I excluded that directory from indexing, restarted the search service, and the CPU usage returned to normal.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Changing default user profile folder on Server 2008 RDS

If you want to move the default user profile folder on Server 2008 to a location other than the C: drive, WITHOUT redirecting the folders via GPO, do the following on the RDS in question:

Open up regedit, and navigate to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList



Edit the ProfilesDirectory key to point to another local drive, and any new profiles created thereafter will be inside that directory.

NOTE: Make sure to create the directory first if it doesn't exist and set up proper matching permissions (check the C:\Users folder for reference.)