This description may help someone who finds it in a Google search — and it will serve as yet another illustration of how our lives are getting more complicated, not less, as time goes on. Note that there was a for a very specific additional issue with the Samsung Series 9 laptop. I pulled a new laptop out of the box and started up Windows 7 Home Premium. After the first few rounds of updates, I installed Office 2010 Professional from disk and connected Outlook to my Exchange mailbox. The mailbox filled up normally. Outlook will not be able activate windows search provide fast search results using the Instant Search functionality unless this service is running. Please contact your system administrator. The and are the center of my life. I cannot use Outlook without being able to search. You should always be searching for things, not looking for them in long lists. In the course of the next couple of hours, I did all of these things. The button was greyed out. I deleted and rebuilt the index, with no effect. I unchecked it to turn the feature off, restarted, checked it to turn it back on, and restarted. Nothing I tried would convince it to stay enabled. It took a while to discover thatwhich is programmed to disable it. Eventually I realized that I had overlooked a detail inand that the answer was in by an author who thought the problem stemmed from an upgrade from Office 2007. There are two Windows features that need to be installed and running on Windows 7 for searching to work in Outlook 2010: Windows Search pictured aboveand Indexing Service. The Indexing Service was unchecked on my new laptop. When I checked the Indexing Service and restarted, Outlook searches were completely normal. Tomorrow it will be something different. I remember when I used to know how to do things instead of how to do Google searches. It took me a while to realize it because I rarely have to restart. It seems to work fine once the service is restarted, so we have our workaround — but this is very odd. What kind of computer do activate windows search have. Going back to Indexing Options, a list of locations for indexing listed on the table. Open Outlook, and type the item you want to search; 10. To do this for Outlook 2010 — 1. This will force Outlook to use the slow non-index search, but it works — every time. This works for Outlook 2007 too although the options may be at different location. Any recommendations for where to go from there. Incidentally, searching from within Outlook 2010 works great. But Win7-64 will not display emails in search results. I found a work around but am not too happy with it. That is to add an Advanced Find function to the ribbon. It works, but you have to select Contacts from the dropdown list. But it finds the contacts. I spent all day yesterday trying to figure this out, to no avail. This number is constantly increasing and never decreases. It can take anywhere from several hours to several days, depending activate windows search the number of files and number of items in Outlook. All relevant boxes ticked but indexing is not done no locations are visible. No search locations can be added. Unfortunately, not in my case. Thought to share hoping somebody have similar situation. No matter what, I cannot keep the Windows Search Email Indexer in Outlook enabled. As soon as I close Outlook, it goes back to Disabled Application Add-ins. I already checked the Indexing Service and Windows Search, both are enabled and looks like working fine. This behavior is by design. This handler is responsible for indexing data in earlier versions of Outlook. Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 now include some of that indexing and search functionality in the program…. The file is C: … Enable Outlook 2010 Search And Indexing On Windows 7 Bruceb … … Outlook 2010 Not Indexing Xp OutlookRecoveryGuide. I had exactly the same Problem, Outlook was not shown in the indexing Window. The indexing is only done while Outlook is running. activate windows search Depending on how many files you have, and how big your Outlook folders are, it may take anywhere from several hours to several days to rebuild the index from scratch. December 17 it was updated again and I had to go in and delete it once again… otherwise I cannot use the search bar in outlook. When I uninstall kb11409, it takes away the the view I have set for Outlook… so I have to go in and set my view to my personal preference again. This one worked — many, many thanks!. Bruce, thank you too, for keeping this blog going. Very obscure problem — tons of time saved today, and in not having to manually search items. The other method, un-indexed is simply not usable or doable. I am running Outlook 365 with Windows 7. My search options stopped activate windows search for some reason and I was about to go mad. Somehow Outlook search was disabled in my registry and everything became greyed out. It's everyone's favorite home page!.