Here is a lesson that I seem to relearn every 5 years or so. Windows Search Service is a resource hog, and needs to be turned off. My Thunderbird email reader was getting to the point of being almost unusable. It was going into periods of non-response for reasons I could not fathom. I could not imagine what it was doing in the periods where it would not respond. The Windows resource monitor did not display any significant usage of any computer resources, yet Thunderbird was too busy to respond to me.

Since I turned off Windows Search on two computers that I believe were both indexing files on my Network Attached Storage, the performance of my computers has taken a giant leap forward.

The reason why I have to keep learning this lesson might be the time lapse between when I buy new computers. By the time I buy a new computer, I forget that I had shut off Windows Search Service on the old computers. It takes a few years of suffering poor performance before I am reminded of the cause.