How to Disable or Speed Up Windows Search Indexing in Vista

Windows Vista’s new indexing service has been the subject of a lot of complaints because it appears to kick in at strange times and thrash your hard drive. Is there anything that we can do to speed this up?

There are actually two options: You can trim down the amount of files that Windows Search is indexing and/or you can disable it entirely if you don’t use the search.


Trimming Down Indexing Locations

The most excellent way to trim down the amount of processor time used by the indexing service is by trimming down the amount of files being indexed. For example, if you don’t regularly search through your C: drive, you don’t really need to be indexing it.

I personally like the search function for Outlook and the Start Menu, but that’s the only places I’m concerned about indexing.

Try typing “Indexing” (without the quotations) into the Control Panel Search or the Start Menu search box and you will see an item called Indexing Options.


You can see here the existing list of locations that are being indexed. For example, I only index the Start Menu and my Outlook. If you need to modify or remove locations, just use the Modify button.


What you need to do to remove a location from being indexed is to uncheck the box. You might need to click the Show All Locations button to also see some of the default locations.


If you need to remove the Start Menu indexing, you would need to click on Start Menu in the summary list at the bottom. This will automatically navigate to the item in the tree.


The Start Menu indexing doesn’t really take much processing time so I really wouldn’t bother removing that.

Disable Indexing Completely

If you prefer to completely disable the indexing service, disable it entirely by just turning off the service.

To do this, just go to Control Panel and open-up Services or another way to do this is by typing services.msc into the Start Menu search box. Look for “Windows Search” in the list of services and just double-click on it to open.


Now change the Startup type of the service to Disabled and then click the Stop button to stop the service.


Windows Search service is now completely disabled.