Yet another desperate Win 10 Spotlight "plese help me" thread...

MadVlad said:

Hi all,

I'm resurrecting this thread because I made quite a discovery. If anyone reads it from start, there are about 15-20 replies talking about Registry settings and re-registering the Windows Spotlight service, and absolutely none of them worked, but

About 2 months ago I travelled abroad (I reside in Serbia), and I went to UK and Netherlands, within the space of two months. In both locations Spotlight on the laptop worked flawlessly. But the moment I get back to Serbia - stops working.

That's interesting. Have you experimented with different DNS providers (in case your ISP's default DNS is the issue)?

Have you tried running a network monitor - something like CurrPorts (with logging) - to determine where Spotlight images are downloaded from?

(Sorry, Spotlight is one of the first things I turn off in my 'admin-mode' provisioning script during OOBE so I never actually see the images.)

I would be very surprised if Microsoft used its own servers for Spotlight images. IMO it's one of the less important services it would farm out to its third-party CDN partners like Akamai... which a tracert might show a network connectivity issue with.

Hope this helps...

RickC said:

That's interesting. Have you experimented with different DNS providers (in case your ISP's default DNS is the issue)?

It's something I considered, but while the desktop is always stationary and fixed to my main ISP, I used to take the laptop to the office where there was a different ISP, and I took it on two holidays where I had also different ISPs, so for 4 main ISPs in Serbia it doesn't work. I decided it probably wasn't to do with DNS.

Also, I was suspicious of NordVPN as I have it on both the laptop and the desktop (I mean, has NordVPN configuration/installation messed around with DNS servers), but I also discounted against it as the moment I take the laptop to UK - bang, Spotlight works. (also, I obviously tried having the UK IP active via the NordVPN almost always in hope it would start working, nope)

So I'm fairly content that I've spent enough time tracking through my PCs and that they are not the problem as such, and that Spotlight is working just fine, but that something is blocking it when I am in a particular region.

I may give CurrPorts a try next time I'm over in the UK in January, but in the meantime I was hoping someone else came across this issue, like this guy here, this sounds exactly like my problem, but all he got were generic answers to reset the Spotlight.