Speed Up Your Computer – Turn off Windows Search Indexing Service

Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 has a Windows Search Indexing service installed and enabled that allows the operating system to search certain places quickly finding files or programs in a flash. In order to search certain locations on your computer quickly the Windows Search indexing service indexes the contents of each location in advance and stores them in memory to speed up it’s search. This can take up a lot of memory and resources and will certainly affect your computers performance. It might even be indexing locations that you never even intend to search for files on. This is why you need to either disable the Windows Search indexing service or modify its process to do minimal work.
Of course you do not need to alter any settings for the Windows Search indexing service if you have not recognized any performance problems on your computer. However if you want to speed up your computer, this is just one of the tasks you can do.

Changing the settings for your Windows Search Indexing service?

You have three options if you want to speed up your computer:

• Turn off Windows Search indexing for one particular location such as a hard drive.
• To reduce the number of locations that are being indexed on your computer.
• Disable the Windows search indexing service altogether.

If you want to turn off the Windows Search Indexing service for a particular drive or location:

1.  Open up My Computer by choosing Computer from the start menu.
2. Right-click on your hard drive you want to change the indexing options for.
3.  From the menu choose Properties. See the screen shot below.

4.  Untick the box at the bottom that says Index the drive for faster searching.
5.  Click  on the OK button and the Windows search indexing service will be turned off for that hard drive. See the screen shot below.

How to disable the Windows Search Indexing completely for all locations:

1.  Go to the Start Menu .
2.  Type services.msc in the search box. As you are typing you will see items appear in the menu. This is because it is being indexed and can be searched quickly.
3.  Scroll-down to find the Indexing Service which is called Windows search and double-click it.

Windows Search Indexing service

4.  Press on  the Stop button to Stop the indexing service.

5.  Under Startup type press on the drop down arrow to see choices.

6.  Choose Disabled.
After disabling and turning off the Windows Indexing Service, you will still be able to use the Windows search but it will work more slowly than with the indexing enabled.
Here is a video that will tell you more about Windows indexing and how you can turn it off or disable it.

How to change your Windows Search Indexing service – indexed locations:

Instead of disabling the Windows Search Indexing you can reduce the number of locations that are being indexed.
1.  Go to the start menu and choose control panel from the menu.
2.  Double click on the Indexing options icon. See the screen shot below.

3.  The Windows indexing options will appear. Click on the location you want to change. See the screen shot below.
4.  Click on the Modify button.

5.  The indexed locations will show. Click on Show all locations button. See the screen shot below.

6.  Now you can see all the locations that are indexed by the Windows Search indexing service. Untick the box next to the locations that you do not want to index.

7.  Click on Ok when you are finished. The locations you un-tick will not be indexed.

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