Windows search broken

[Theguywhobea]

So I've had an issue all week with my work machine. It's a Dell XPS 13 9360 running Windows 10 Pro on a 256GB SSD. It seems that if I try to search anything with in windows, I get 2 or 3 characters in, the search results freeze and the window closes. This works with both the start menu and if I open the settings window and try to search there the window will freeze, then close. I'm not sure what's causing this, as it's my work machine I don't ever go into an unsavory or sketchy websites, I don't have any weird programs as I really only run Chrome, Niagara and EasyIO's CPT tool. Only started about a week ago, maybe right after the latest creators update?

 

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, Theguywhobea said:

So I've had an issue all week with my work machine. It's a Dell XPS 13 9360 running Windows 10 Pro on a 256GB SSD. It seems that if I try to search anything with in windows, I get 2 or 3 characters in, the search results freeze and the window closes. This works with both the start menu and if I open the settings window and try to search there the window will freeze, then close. I'm not sure what's causing this, as it's my work machine I don't ever go into an unsavory or sketchy websites, I don't have any weird programs as I really only run Chrome, Niagara and EasyIO's CPT tool. Only started about a week ago, maybe right after the latest creators update?

 

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Have you tried re-installing Windows?

 

I'd recommend first turning it off and turning it back on before re-installing.

[vanished]

29 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Have you tried re-installing Windows?

 

I'd recommend first turning it off and turning it back on before re-installing.

reboot and reinstall  the solution to every problem in windows...

as sad is it is, that's all I have as a suggestion too.

[paddy-stone]

You could maybe try turning the service off and on again, set it to run on demand, turn it off, then turn it on again and see if it's still doing it... not sure if that will work, but at least it's something to try.

[Theguywhobea]

48 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Have you tried re-installing Windows?

 

I'd recommend first turning it off and turning it back on before re-installing.

I would but being that it's my work machine and we don't have a real IT department it's not as easy as it would be for my personal machine. Also, Niagara has as stupid licensing system that generates a host-id for your install, reinstalling Windows would change my host ID and cause my license to be invalidated.

49 minutes ago, Judd said:

95% sure it is a RAM issue. These new update require a good bit of ram and surprisingly, windows settings takes about 8gb to start and search something for me. It could also be that you maybe have filled up your ssd and as it gets fuller it slows down. But this is unlikey. I do know of sometimes that chrome will install something called chromium. Go to control panel and installed programs and see if chromium is installed. This happened to me and I till I uninstalled it my computer would lock up.

Ehhhhh, I can't see that being realistic, I've used Windows 10 with plenty of machines running 4GB of RAM and never had that type of issue and my work machine has 8GB. SSD isn't even half full, and the machine is only 3 months old so I doubt it's from overuse.

 

18 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

You could maybe try turning the service off and on again, set it to run on demand, turn it off, then turn it on again and see if it's still doing it... not sure if that will work, but at least it's something to try.

I never though to do that, I'll have to give that a try.

[paddy-stone]

11 hours ago, Theguywhobea said:

I would but being that it's my work machine and we don't have a real IT department it's not as easy as it would be for my personal machine. Also, Niagara has as stupid licensing system that generates a host-id for your install, reinstalling Windows would change my host ID and cause my license to be invalidated.

Ehhhhh, I can't see that being realistic, I've used Windows 10 with plenty of machines running 4GB of RAM and never had that type of issue and my work machine has 8GB. SSD isn't even half full, and the machine is only 3 months old so I doubt it's from overuse.

 

I never though to do that, I'll have to give that a try.

Any luck?

[Theguywhobea]

2 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Any luck?

Haven't tried it yet, if I have time later today I'll get on that, otherwise I'll be trying Monday morning probably.

[Theguywhobea]

On 10/1/2017 at 6:21 AM, paddy-stone said:

Any luck?

Alright, the problem has officially been resolved. I tried your suggestion of restarting the search service, modifying when it comes on and such and it didn't seem to work. I'm not entirely sure which thing I tried fixed it but after I found an microsoft article saying to run some commands for DISM.exe it seemed like it found an issue and tried to repair it. Upon restart I didn't see any resolution but I did have a weird login issue where it took 5+ mins for the password window to show up. I believe after I installed the lastest Windows update last night and then powered my machine back on this morning I've found that my search works again! I can finally open programs the way I'm used to rather than manually scrolling through the list of programs in the start menu. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.