Turning off indexing on your hard drives is another very simple way to boost your computer’s performance. This option is automatically set by Windows XP, but it is very useless. I think we have all had the experience of using Windows Search (not to be confused with Windows Live Search) to try and find a file and having to wait 10 minutes while watching that stupid dog sniff around the screen!
Don’t worry, turning off the indexing service will do no harm to your computer. You may then ask, Well how am I supposed to search for something!? Easy, use Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search! Both of these programs are light years faster than the regular Windows search, so it’s your preference whether you want to stick with Windows or go for Google software, but either way you definitely want to turn off indexing to speed up your computer!
Here’s how you do it: First, open My Computer and right-click on your local drive (C, D, etc) and choose Properties
On the General tab, you’ll a checkbox at the bottom called “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching”. Go ahead and uncheck that and you’ll get a popup dialog box asking whether you want to apply these settings to all files and folders or just to the root of the drive:
Go ahead and choose all files and subfolders, otherwise it’s going to still index everything on the drive! Click OK and you’ll have to sit and wait for a few minutes as the settings are applied to all the files on your computer. Unfortunately, every file in the file system has an attribute that tells Windows whether or not it should be indexed, so this has to to be updated for all files.
If you get any Access Denied errors along the way, just go ahead and click Ignore All because it’s probably just system files that are currently in use. Hope this was helpful!
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