Disabling MySites and MyLinks

• From Shared Service Administration site, choose "Personalization services permissions" under User Profiles and My Sites
• Remove 'NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users'
• Remove rights to 'Create personal sites' and 'Use personal features' from all other users ( service accounts ).

Setup Search Settings

• Go to Shared Services Administration site
• Under Search, choose "Search Settings"
• Select 'Content Sources and crawl schedules'

• Edit the 'Local Office SharePoint Server Sites' content source by clicking on the 'Edit' context menu

• Set the crawl schedules as
  • Full Crawl – weekly every Saturday
  • Incremental Crawl – every 4 hours

Changing the Index location

• The following stsadm commands will set the SharePoint Services index location

  stsadm -o spsearch -action list

  stsadm -o spsearch -indexlocation E:\SharePoint\Data\SEARCHINDEX

• The following stsadm command will set the SSP index location ( use if SSP is configured )

  stsadm -o osearch -action list

  stsadm -o editssp -title [SSPNAME] -indexlocation E:\SharePoint\Data\OSEARCHINDEX

Change service accounts and their passwords

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration, click Operations.
2. Under Security Configuration, click Service accounts.
3. Click the radio button beside Web application pool. Select Windows SharePoint Services Web Application. Select the application pool where you want to change the identity, for example: Sharepoint - 80.
4. Make a note of the existing settings in case you need to unwind your changes.
5. Select the Configurable radio button. Provide the user name and password. It helps to be explicit here and use the domain\account format (e.g. mydomain\SPService). Also be sure to use a strong password. Click OK.
6. To restart the application pool, either open IIS and recycle the application pool, or open a command prompt and type iisreset -noforce.
7. Open your SharePoint site in a browser to confirm that the change was successful.  

This change will be automatically propagated to all web front-ends.