Disable Indexing in Windows for Better Performance
The indexing feature was designed to speed up Windows search. Basically, it indexes all files and folders on your hard drive, so that the indexes can be used to find files and folders more quickly when the need arises. In theory, your files and folders should only be indexed when the computer is idle, so that there aren’t any performance issues.
Unfortunately, the indexing feature is not perfect. Even though it’s not supposed to kick in when you are using your computer, it often does just that. This causes your hard drive to slow everything down. As the name implies, it creates and stores an index of all the folders and files on the drive which reduces seek time to locate the item requested. On a mechanical drive it was fairly effective. On an SSD it's unnecessary. The seek times are already so fast no performance benefit will be realized.
So, if you don’t use Windows search all that often, it makes sense to disable indexing altogether.
This is a service that you don't need. You can still search files without this service.
Disabling indexing is easy. You can simply right-click on your hard drive in Computer (This PC), click the Properties and uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" in Windows XP or "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" in Windows 7 and later versions of Windows OS in Windows Vista "Index this drive for faster searching".
You’ll get a popup dialog box asking whether you want to apply these settings to all files and subfolders or just to the root of the drive.
Choose all files and subfolders, otherwise it’s going to still index everything on the drive.
If you get any Access Denied errors along the way, just go ahead and click "Ignore All" button because it’s probably just system files that are currently in use.
Completely Disable Indexing
The above methods will reduce what’s indexed by Windows, but the indexing service will still be running. I’ll show you how to turn off the indexing service altogether.
1. Open the Control Panel and click on Administrative Tools. Then click on Services in the list. You can also open Services directly by typing services.msc in the Run dialog or Start Menu search box.
2. Now scroll down till you find either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services.
3. Double-click on Indexing Service or Windows Search and click the Stop button to stop the service. Then change the Startup Type to Disabled.
After this, you’re going to want to restart your computer. When you turn indexing off, you can still perform a search in Windows, it’ll just give you a message saying it’s going to be slower because there index is not running.
Below tutorial is designed to help you transform your slow PC into a faster PC.
Tweaking & Optimizing Window Operating System
Unfortunately, the indexing feature is not perfect. Even though it’s not supposed to kick in when you are using your computer, it often does just that. This causes your hard drive to slow everything down. As the name implies, it creates and stores an index of all the folders and files on the drive which reduces seek time to locate the item requested. On a mechanical drive it was fairly effective. On an SSD it's unnecessary. The seek times are already so fast no performance benefit will be realized.
So, if you don’t use Windows search all that often, it makes sense to disable indexing altogether.
This is a service that you don't need. You can still search files without this service.
Disabling indexing is easy. You can simply right-click on your hard drive in Computer (This PC), click the Properties and uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" in Windows XP or "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" in Windows 7 and later versions of Windows OS in Windows Vista "Index this drive for faster searching".
You’ll get a popup dialog box asking whether you want to apply these settings to all files and subfolders or just to the root of the drive.
Choose all files and subfolders, otherwise it’s going to still index everything on the drive.
If you get any Access Denied errors along the way, just go ahead and click "Ignore All" button because it’s probably just system files that are currently in use.
Completely Disable Indexing
The above methods will reduce what’s indexed by Windows, but the indexing service will still be running. I’ll show you how to turn off the indexing service altogether.
1. Open the Control Panel and click on Administrative Tools. Then click on Services in the list. You can also open Services directly by typing services.msc in the Run dialog or Start Menu search box.
2. Now scroll down till you find either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services.
3. Double-click on Indexing Service or Windows Search and click the Stop button to stop the service. Then change the Startup Type to Disabled.
After this, you’re going to want to restart your computer. When you turn indexing off, you can still perform a search in Windows, it’ll just give you a message saying it’s going to be slower because there index is not running.
Below tutorial is designed to help you transform your slow PC into a faster PC.
Tweaking & Optimizing Window Operating System