Simple Ways to Increase Computer Performance – Turn Off Indexing on Local Drives
Posted on July 5, 2007 at 9:37 pm
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 hard 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!
[tags]increase computer performance, increase computer speed, turn off indexing, windows xp[/tags]
» Filed Under Computer Tips
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11 Responses to “Simple Ways to Increase Computer Performance – Turn Off Indexing on Local Drives”
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Add a second hard drive to Windows Vista search index Says:
[...] That’s it. Windows will begin indexing the new location and results from those extra drives should now appear in your searches. In this way, you can also add network drives to the Windows search index as long as the drive is a mapped drive. Note that turning on indexing in Windows is a great way to find files quickly and I would suggest you keep it on in Vista, however, you may want to turn off indexing in XP to increase computer performance. [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Well i have two questions regarding this. First one, if i was unchecking the Indexing only for the drive C. Could i use normal windows search for D drive. If so would it include the C drive too? and the second one, could it be reproducable. I mean can i check the indexing once more later?
Hi Selvan,
Good questions! Yes you can turn off indexing for each drive or partition individually. So if you uncheck the indexing for C, D would still be indexed, but would not include C.
For the second question, yes you can turn the indexing back on by following the same steps and rechecking the box in the Properties of the drive. You can do this at any time!
Hope that helps!!
I’ve a weird problem;
I’ve turned off “indexing” for the drive, but almost every new folder created is “indexed”? huh!
also I’ve never met a faster search than;
DIR /S filename.*
or
DIR /S *.ext
whatever filename or extention you’re looking for:
“wav, jpg, mp3″ etc.
it produces instant results even for files that are way up some obscure tree.
To do this, open a “DOS box” and type “cd \”
from there you do the search for whatever file(s) you want.
DIR /S *.*
will show every file on the drive except hidden / system files if you want to see those add ” /a ”
to the line, and it would look like this
DIR /S /A *.*
it can also be “Piped” and viewed later
DIR/S filename.* > search.txt
the only real use for the “indexing service” is if your PC is set up as a huge file server or web server containing a horrendous amount of files and folders, especially folders containing 10′s of thousands of files. but for the normal user it’s more hassle in wasted resources and space than it returns in performance.
Cheers
◄RfD►
Richard,
Thanks for the tips! Excellent! I appreciate the comment!
By the way, how do you know each new folder is indexed? Is the check box “For fast searching, allow indexing service to index this folder” checked?
Aseem
Aseem,
Yes, the little check box under “advanced” is usually marked with the exception of any new folder “I” create on the root level but if I dragondrop the folders from a data cd or dvd that I created on the same or another machine or extract from a .cab or .zip file, the whole lot of the folders is “serviced for indexing” and sometimes the files are also. The reason I find this out is because I work with a lot of graphic and audio files and before I open to edit I always remove the “Archive” and set the “Read Only” attributes so I’m always forced to do a “Save as” instead of possibly ruining the original. So when I find the files are “indexed” (even though I never asked for them to be) I check the folder and usually it’s also “indexed”
what a pain this can be to fix sometimes especially after unloading 10 or 12 Data DVD’s of audio files containing a ton of .wav or .mp3 files.
Are there any solutions or is it just a bug in the way “exploder” handles “outside” files?
I do know how to externally modify the “Archive” & “Read Only” attributes in one pass but not the indexing?
Attrib /s -a +r *.*
from the folder just below all of the files I want to change, marks them as stated: -”Archive” +”Read Only”
(from the DOS box this is extremely fast but will quit processing if there are any “Hidden” or “System” files within the same tree).
Cheers
◄RfD►
The best replacement is Everything, freeware from http://www.voidtools.com. It works instantaneously. Honest. When first run, it takes less than a minute to set up, but that never happens again. Keeps up to date in real time; no time-consuming reindexing. Small, uses very few resources. NTFS only.
That is NOT the way to turn off the Indexing Service.
Those checkboxes on the drive’s property menu are simply asking whether or not you want to ALLOW the indexing service to index that particular drive IF the service is running. If it is not running then nothing will be indexed:
1. Right click My Computer and click Manage. This will open Computer Management.
2. Double click Services and Applications. This will expand the list.
3. Right click Indexing Service. This will bring up a menu giving you the options to start, stop or pause the service. If the stop and pause options are greyed out then then service is not running. If the start option is greyed out, then the service is running, and you would need to click stop to stop the service.
4. If you want to configure more options, you can double click Indexing Service to bring up the Indexing Service screen. From there you can configure the service, the catalogs and the drives/folders within each catalog. But this is only relevant IF the service is running. If it is not running, then no need to configure all of that (which is simply the quicker way to configure to allow each drive for indexing than going thru the drive properties menu in explorer. again, there is no reason to do either if the service is not running).
An even easier way for the average user to configure the Indexing Service is:
Start Menu > Search > Change Preferences > With Indexing Service
This screen will clearly tell you if the service is enabled or disabled and lets you change the setting if you wish. You can also do further configuration by clicking Change Index Service Settings (Advanced) which will lead you to the MMC Computer Management screen described in my previous post, but for most people this will not be neccessary.
(note: both of my posts refer to the Indexing Service in Windows XP. i’m not sure how the service works in any other version of Windows.)
I also had to disable the Windows Index service. Same method applies for what Kumar902 said. Look for the service named “Windows Search”. This was in addition to the service name “Indexing Service” mentioned above. I stopped and disabled both of these. The “Windows Search” one permanently killed my searchindex process that was still running after stopping the “Indexing Service”.
You’ll need Windows Search (and therefor Indexing option set) to be running to use the Outlook advanced search feature. Which I use often to search within the text of messages. Windows Search is the newere search engine which I believe runs more efficiently then the older Indexing Service. But you don’t need both services running. Make sure Indexing Service is stopped as explained above. But make sure Windows Search is started (I have mine running in automatic mode and set to start. This makes sure it’s running at system startup everytime. I do this so that I can use the Advanced Search feature of Outlook. I also use Windows Search to search for text in a file. I’m surprised no one has mentioned that as it’s very common to want to search for text in a file.