Indexing Annoyance

What is Indexing and what does this have to do with tweaking your Windows OS for the better? Well, Windows Indexing is a Windows Service that runs in the background constantly maintaining and organizing the files on your hard drive. This way when you want to search for these files the search locates files a great deal faster. The Windows based search that is, the one you probably find yourself using about once a month.

Why we want to shut this is off is simple, the Indexing Service runs in the background and is not useful to most users. Window's search function will still work perfectly, it will only be slower in delivering results. Aside from the CPU memory it takes up, Indexing also causes your hard drive to make noise. When your computer is idle you can hear the hard drive making noises, alot of the times it is because this service is running. Indexing is designed to run especially when the computer is idle, idealistically to cause the least inconvenience. But on both Windows XP and Vista, this service can be caught running frequently while you are using the computer.

This tweak is for Windows XP and Windows Vista, and can be reversed easily at anytime, with no risk to harming your computer. Update: Sometimes exceptionally slow computers will load on start up slower by turning indexing off, if this happens you may want to turn indexing back on. You won't know until you restart after turning indexing off. Keep in mind this is rare.

Windows XP
1. Open My Computer so that you can see all of your hard drives.

2. Right click on a hard drive, and click Properties.

3. At the bottom of the window that appears, which should look like the one to the right, at the bottom uncheck "Allow Indexing..."

4. There will be a prompt showing that it is making a changes, let it go, it won't take long. If you get any Access Denied errors, just click ignore all.

5. Repeat this for all of your hard drives and your Done!







Windows Vista
1. Go to start and in the search menu type in "Windows Search Service" without the quotes.

2. Right Click on the result, and click Properties.

3. In the drop down menu next to Startup type, select Disabled.

4. At the lower part of the window, select Stop to stop the service from running. If for any reason you want to change this, repeat the steps to turn Indexing back on.

5. Click Apply and then Ok.

Disabling Indexing is argued if it really does improve performance on your system. The answer is most likely but not always, Indexing occurs in Profiles, Documents, Start Menu, E-mails and a few other areas. If your computer is very robust in these areas, disabling this service will affect performance. Many people though, see great results in disabling Indexing. Digg it.