Laptop overheating comes out to be a Vista Search issue

My laptop started heating more and more until at some point I had to start forcing it to "Sleep". (it has Vista on it)

At some point I got really aggravated by that fact and started investigating. Forums revealed that the issue could be linked to heavy processor usage.

Process Explorer showed that I had some wierd behavior even when the machine was idle (Indexing service is disabled - dummest thing ever) - explorer.exe taking 100% for 5-10 seconds.

Repeatedly.

There was a wierd dll doing that (SHLWAPI.DLL):

At some forum I found out that this was related to the start menu search. WTF?

It comes out that the start menu search (which I find one of the few useful things that come with Vista) does a search in the index first and then goes the the hard drive.

We don't want that.

There is an option in the start menu settings which stops that - problem solved.


The good thing is that while searching at the forums I found a pretty useful tool - Dell fan control - one can see everything and EVEN control fans:



dell fan control.png (78.88 KB)