What is windows spotlight download?

[yodap]

What is windows spotlight download and (based on the answers I get) how can I disable it?

I need to keep an eye on cpu usage because of the Distributive Computing I do and was shocked to see my temps nearing 50C when I thought I was otherwise pretty much idle.

Googling turns up a lot of Mac OS issues with something they call spotlight.

 

[clifford_cooley]

https://us.en.kb.sony.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/59892/~/what-is-the-windows-spotlight-feature?

Windows Spotlight is a feature of the Windows® 10 operating system that will show you images from the Microsoft® Bing® homepage, and let you vote if you want to use one of those images for the lock screen background. This allows Windows Spotlight to tailor the look of the lock screen for the preferences of each user.

Windows Spotlight can also learn from the apps you have installed and the services you use, and over time, give you recommendations as to which apps you may want to check out, or what features of the Windows 10 operating system you might be missing out on.

etc...

 

[yodap]

Thanks clifford. I cant express how happy I am about this feature

BTW, that screen shot was from my 8.1 upgrade and on the preview rig it's not running. Curious!

 

[yodap]

This has almost become a deal breaker for me. It ran hard all night and that shouldn't happen. Shutting it down to investigate further.

 

[yodap]

Just wondering if this is happening to anyone else. The problem does not go away on it's own nor can I stop it for more than 30 seconds before it starts again. I read somewhere that you need to opt in to this but I did not. And if you can opt in, why can't you opt out? For the record I have not seen 1 picture from Bing and have not been asked to vote on anything so it's my opinion that something is broken.

Looking at 3 options.
Go in through the back door and rename or delete the thing from sys32.
Clean install the upgrade.
Restore Win8.1 image.

I can see this being a lengthy process and ending up at option 3 anyway lol.

Hopefully my next post in this thread will be from a clean win10 machine.

 

[bassfisher6522]

https://us.en.kb.sony.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/59892/~/what-is-the-windows-spotlight-feature?

I don't think so....it may be part of the bloatware associated with OEM systems but on a clean install....that "windows spot light is non-existent on my machine.

 

[clifford_cooley]

I was only answering what it is not where it comes from. And either way I have no experience with it, so I have no opinion.

 

[yodap]

The damndest thing.

But first, this is a home built system that had W8 then 8.1. You know the one that MS offered for $40 at the launch. Not sure if that had an OEM designation or not. But no bloat.

I booted up and sure enough the process was whizzing away with 70% cpu activity for an hour with no end in sight. Before I got down to hacking this thing I decided to see if there were any lock screen changes and there wasn't but I bypass that usually so I created another limited access account to actually be presented with the sign in process. Windows Spotlight UL/DL was not running from within the new account so I logged out and logged back in with my account, and again not running.

Scratching head. Moving on to the next logical step.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Now that you have upgraded, are you thinking of a clean install?

 

[yodap]

Now that you have upgraded, are you thinking of a clean install?

Yes. I believe in clean installs for the most part but I was hoping this would work for the sake of the billions of windows users. Clearly this type of roll out was ambitious at best and a disaster at worst. The other reason is my issue just came back after deleting the 2nd account so my upgrade is officially buggy.
Can I assume that no registry data will be held over like a normal clean install? And can I also assume the key is taken care of automatically?

 

[bassfisher6522]

Can I assume that no registry data will be held over like a normal clean install?

Should be......

And can I also assume the key is taken care of automatically?

Yes...just leave the key input screen(s) blank

 

[roborahull]

bro i had the same problem the process windows spotlight upload download was hogging so much of my processor that many times it rendered my pc useless, finally i deleted the backgroundtransferhost file and it is working fine now