Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Turn off indexing on your local drives

Posted on July 5, 2007 at 9:37 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Increase Computer Performance series!

Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Configuring the paging file
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Defragmenting your hard drive
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Stopping the startup programs!
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance - Save hard disk space!
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Turn off indexing on your local drives
Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance - Disable Visual Effects in the Performance Options tab

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!

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6 Responses to “Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace - Turn off indexing on your local drives”

selvan naga said on : July 6th, 2007 at 7:36 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?

akishore said on : July 6th, 2007 at 8:06 am

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!!

Richard FDisk said on : August 21st, 2007 at 2:57 pm

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►

akishore said on : August 21st, 2007 at 3:15 pm

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

Richard FDisk said on : August 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm

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►

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