This is the sixth post of our series of 15 posts (one post everyday) about Tips and Tricks to make your Windows experience more satisfactory and comfortable. You can subscribe to our RSS Feed or daily e-mail updates for latest content. Keep checking back this space to know about useful Windows Tips and Tricks.

Here’s the today’s tweak.

Disable Indexing Service to Speed up Performance

If you are the type who seldom uses Windows inbuilt search functionality, then you should be aware of the fact that in order to make searches faster, Windows uses an indexing service which constantly runs in the background to index files and cache results for better searches.

But if you do not use Search function, then why waste resources on Indexing service. Here’s how to disable indexing service.

Windows XP

Right Click My Computer and select Manage and then click on Services under Services And Applications. Now look for Indexing Services. Double Click on it and set its startup type to Disabled.

Windows Vista

For Windows Vista under Services, look for Windows Search, instead of Indexing Services, and then set its startup type to Disabled. this will stop indexing service throughout the system.

Alternatively, You can disable Indexing service for selected hard-drives on your system. To do this simply open Computer and right click on the drive you don’t want to index and select Properties, and then uncheck ‘Index this drive for faster searching’ and click on OK.

If your drive has lots of files, then it may take a few moments as it applies attributes to all files and folders of the drive.

As indexing service consumes a lot of resources, this will have a significant improvement on system performance though it’ll lead slower searches when you use Windows Search.