Speed Up or Disable Windows Search Indexing in Vista
The new indexing service built into Windows Vista has been the subject of a lot of complaints, since it seems to kick in at strange times and thrash your hard drive. So what can we do to speed this up?
There's two options: You can either trim down the amount of files that Windows Search is indexing, or you can disable it entirely if you never use the search.
Trim Down Indexing Locations
The best way to trim down the amount of processor time the indexing service uses is by trimming down the amount of files being indexed. For instance, if you don't regularly search through your C: drive, there's really no need to be indexing it.
Personally, I love the search function for Outlook and the Start Menu, but that's the only places I care about indexing.
Type Indexing into the control panel search or the start menu search box, and you should see an item called Indexing Options.
Here you can see the current list of locations that are being indexed. For instance, I only index the start menu and Outlook. If you want to modify or remove locations, use the Modify button.
All you have to do to remove a location from being indexed is uncheck the box. You might have to click the Show All Locations button to see some of the default locations.
If you wanted to remove the start menu indexing, you'll need to click on Start Menu in the summary list at the bottom, and it'll automatically navigate to the item in the tree.
The start menu indexing really doesn't take much processing time though, so I wouldn't bother removing that.
Completely Disable Indexing
If you'd prefer to completely disable the indexing service, you can disable it entirely by turning off the service.
Open up Services through control panel, or by typing services.msc into the start menu search box. Find "Windows Search" in the list of services and double-click on it to open it.
Change the Startup type of the service to Disabled, and then click the Stop button to stop the service.
At this point the Windows Search service is completely disabled.
I never understood why they didn't make it easier to stop the indexing for a temporary period of time. At one point a Microsoft employee was making a sidebar gadget to do that, but I don't think it ever got released.
Thanks for the Indexing articles. You seem to be one of the few writers discussing this Windows feature. When it work, it's really nice. When it's thrashing escessively, it's a brat. Your tips are a help.
One thing I've noticed is that after a cold start, Indexing seems to run thru all the files again. But, if I come out of Hibernation, it does not do that. Since Hibernate works well on my computers, that's what I do.
Also, de-selected Favorites and other folders in Indexing Options reduces drive thrashing a lot. It makes no sense to me for Windows to constantly update favorites while I want my machine's resources dedicated to surfing, not indexing!
They need to have a timed temporary Indexing disable thing like they did in MSN Desktop Search. I can't turn off my computer tonight, but I also can't get a good night's sleep with this thing clattering away.
By the way, I personally find the Favorites and History indexing really useful. It isn't indexing the webpages, just the link titles, so I doubt that's causing any thrashing. In fact, I wish it would index the Favorited webpage content so that I can search through them.
It took me a few months to get fed up enough with the constant clicking before I checked the Resource Monitor to find out what was causing the constant hard drive use. If this were my primary computer, I probably would have checked it sooner, because it does slow down my video/audio editing enough that I've wondered if I should just use my old 500 MHz computer. Also, the midnight clicking gets annoying, especially since no windows are open and I didn't have any clue as to what was causing the hard drive access.
I only use the search function for the Start menu(wait, is it still called that, or is it "the circular button with no words, but does have the Windows logo") and files in my user folder(I did a search once… the file I was looking for wasn't indexed, though, so that search was useless).