Event ID 3088 — Windows Search

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

The Windows Search service indexes information about the contents of your hard disk to facilitate your searches, making them much faster and more accurate.

Event Details

Resolve

Free resource and restart the service

Determine whether your computer is low on system resources such as CPU performance, disk input/output (I/O) performance, or memory, and then restart the Windows Search service.

To identify what is causing your system to be low on resources, you can generate a System Diagnostics Report by using Reliability and Performance Monitor, or you can use Resource Monitor to determine (in real time) which applications or services are using too many system resources.

To generate a System Diagnostics Report, which will present system information collected for 60 seconds, use the procedure in the "Generate a System Diagnostics Report" section in this topic. To use Resource Monitor to monitor system resources in real time, use the procedure in the "Start Resource Monitor" section.

To perform these procedures, you must have membership in Administrators, or you must have been delegated the appropriate authority.

Generate a System Diagnostics Report

To collect system information for 60 seconds and generate a System Diagnostics Report:

1. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. (Click Start, point to All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.)
2. At the command prompt, type perfmon /report and then press ENTER. Reliability and Performance Monitor will start collecting data to create the System Diagnostics Report.
3. When the report is ready for viewing, locate the Diagnostic Results section of the report and check for any Warnings. You can follow links to additional help on resolving warnings from this section. In addition, you can expand each category in the Basic System Checks section to see more details about why warnings appear. Also, the Performance section provides process-level details about top consumers of resources.

Start Resource Monitor

To start Resource Monitor:

Important: Resource Monitor stops collecting information while a System Diagnostics Report is being generated. To start collecting information after a System Diagnostics Report has been completed, click Start in Monitor.

1. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. (Click Start, point to All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.)
2. At the command prompt, type perfmon /res and then press ENTER. Resource Monitor will start running.
3. Four scrolling graphs in the Resource Overview pane display the real-time usage of CPU, Disk, Network, and Memory. Four expandable sections below the graphs contain process-level details about each resource. Click the resource labels to see more information, or click a graph to expand its corresponding details. You can use the real-time usage information to identify top resource consumers. Click a column heading to sort the data in the table by the criterion in that column. Click the column heading again to reverse the sort order.

Restart the Windows Search service

To restart the Windows Search service:

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.
2. At the command prompt, stop the Windows Search service by typing net stop wsearch. 
3. Restart the Windows Search service by typing net start wsearch.

Verify

To verify that files are being indexed:

1. Click Start and then click Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, type notepad.exe. Notepad should open.
3. Type an unusual keyword or phrase in the new document, and then save the file to your My Documents directory or to another directory that is being indexed.
4. Click Start, and then type your new keyword or phrase in the Search box. The file you created using Notepad should appear in the Search Results window.

Related Management Information

Windows Search

File Services