Search showing old, deleted apps and not showing newly installed apps

dalchina said:

Just like any upgrade action, including an in-place upgrade repair, where all is well with a new user account but not in an existing one, it is very unlikely a user profile issue will be fixed.

But you might be lucky..

Well, that really sucks. I was trying to debloat Windows and in return, I got a feature broken. I'll try doing an in place upgrade repair and check if that works

dalchina said:

We don't know if that was the cause or not.

My personal approach to Cortana (which changes in function and implentation into 20H2) is to leave well alone - except I do use it for reminders. Otherwise I ignore it.

It uses virtually nothing by way of resources if 'Hey Cortana' is disabled.

Talk of MS spying is, as has been repeatedly and at great length discussed here, greatly overdone. If worried about that you would never use an email service- certainly not an MS one. You would always use a VPN- albeit that gives you limited protection. You would never sync anything anywhere- that includes Onedrive and syncing settings between devices, and you would never use any form of cloud-based service.

Once you go down that route, you at least have to be consistent.

So if I disable "Hey Cortana", will it use less resources? I really want my system to be as light as possible. Of course, Linux is great for that but Windows is what I need.

dalchina said:

No, that's not what I said.



If it's not using RAM or CPU- why bother about hacking it? What would you gain?

Windows can be readily broken by attempts to remove or disable bits. Removing apps you don't want is fine.

Got it, but I don't want online search. I only want to search for files, what can I do about that?

dalchina said:

It seems Windows search works for you with a new user account.

Repairing your damaged user profile seems infeasible.

You have two basic options.

a. transfer to the new user profile.
b. forget Windows search (which also provides content indexing) and use one of the various free fast search tools, most of which do not provide content indexing.

The choice is yours.

I'll go with option A and mark this as solved then, thank you for all your patience so far.
Also, I just want to say that my hate for Windows is increasing, it forcefully gives feature people barely use and doesn't even allow us to disable them. (F*** you Microsoft)

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Also, @dalchina, if I create another user account as administrator, will that cause any problems?