If you don’t perform much file searching on your Windows XP Computer or, perhaps, you use another search provider for searching local files you might be able to squeeze a little more performance out of your computer by telling it not to index your hard disks.

 

By default Windows XP likes to keep an index of files, for fast file searching, which are used by the Indexing Service. To find out if your drive is being Indexed head into My Computer then right-click on a hard drive and select Properties. Towards the bottom of the dialog box you will see an entry “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching” – uncheck this box and click OK. You may be asked if you want to apply the change to just the root folder on the drive or to all subfolders and files – so make your choice and click OK. If you did select all sub folders and files you will need to wait for Windows XP to work through each file “Applying Attributes” – which can take some time on large hard drives.

To switch off the local indexing service completely you can head into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, then Services (or just click Start, Run, then type services.msc). Scroll down in the list of services until you find “Indexing Service”, highlight it and click “Stop the Service”. When service is stopped, right click and select Properties then set the Startup Type to disabled and click OK.