How to Remove/Disable Windows Search 4.0 from Windows XP

Last week i had a friend of me who insisted on keeping his pc with Windows XP instead of buying a newer one. After a fresh installation and installing of all updates and additional software he got stuck with the new and ‘improved’ Windows (Desktop) Search.

He said, everytime i do a search the bloody tools tells me it can’t find a file because it is just not looking where i want it to look. Can i disable it?

Ofcourse, just uninstall the update and it should be gone. Guess what?! It didn’t.

So after doing a bit of research i found out that you can just unregister this one dll that hooks up on your Windows Search in the registry, and it should give you back the original Windows Search.

Now how will you do that? Follow the steps below (on your own risk!)

  1. Click Start
  2. Click Run
  3. type: regsvr32 /u “%programfiles%\Windows Desktop Search\wdsShell.dll”  and hit ENTER.

This should tell you that the dynamic library is now unregistered. Hit the search and note the difference!