XP: Turn off Search Indexing

Contributor Icon Contributed by winslow Date Icon October 10, 2003  
Tag Icon Tagged: Windows

By default windows XP indexes and records information on all the files on your system in order to speed up searching speeds. If you don’t care about quick searches, this can be disabled to improved general speed.


Microsoft says the indexing service improves the speed of your searches. Indexing enables you to search for information such as text in the document, or properties, such as creation date, of the document.
The entire contents of the drive are not indexed unless you elect to index files and subfolders when prompted.
However, this indexing service adds to overhead and overall computer speed. If you would like to disable this service, follow the steps below.

1. Left click on My Computer
2. Right click on your hard drive
3. Left click on Properties
4. Click on General tab if not already selected
5. Click on Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching which should disable it.
6. You may need to repeat if you have additional hard drives

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  • great info, thank you tech-recipes.com , my computer cpu usage is abnormal todays and i hear acces of hardisk everytime and my computer frozens a few seconds then go to normal, my last solution is to turn off the search indexing..
  • Darlene
    Thank you for making this so easy for a 'computer challenged person'! You are a blessing! :)
  • brahim113
    Hello guys.. i got a problem with the windows indexing thingy. I cant get a grip on how i should fix it. My outlook seems to fail like all the time. If u got a solution. Please email me at once
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