The problem is these 'solutions' never go away. They are never revisited. So people just keep applying them because 15 years ago they had an issue with them.
Appreciate the utility you pointed out, will happily look into it.
If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)
So regardless of the metrics that support such practice, and casting aside the thousands of people that have routinely seen benefit from the practice, Windows can't be optimized further by the end-user?
As someone who has never encountered a well optimized Microsoft product, and as someone who has routinely had to modify their off-the-shell installs, color me suspicious.
(Agreed, the shady practices and over-zealous disabling of services should stop; but come on -- the end user occasionally understands what they need to do better than the engineer that sold them a generic tool to facilitate generic computer-enabled work.)
I don't know what happened to the idea of user friendly software respecting the intentions of a user. Modern OSes really are effectively just well funded socially acceptable malware.
Privacy scripts are a very common attack vector due to their popularity these days.
Not to mention that the benefits of these “tweaks” is negligible at best.
When you make it hard to trust the system, people will look at any component that seems unnecessary. They might not know what it is, but they don't trust it anymore. So it might as well get disabled. You know, to be safe.
But at the end of the day I suppose it's only a small percent of users, isn't it? I'm sure the aggressive push for automatic updates — replacing the "Cancel" button by "Maybe Later", and the "Maybe Later" by "You have 2 minutes" — has worked miracles.
So I think we can expect more of this in the future, and the scripts will get even more paranoid in response. What an antagonistic situation.