Disabling XP’s Indexing Service Can Improve Performance

You can almost ignore the question of whether XP’s Indexing Service slows down your computer. The fact is it doesn’t do much good anyway. Indexing is supposed to help Windows keep better tabs on files, but it does a terrible job of it and offers the user no options for configuring what gets indexed. It’s almost beside the point that it can slow your system—sometimes only a little and sometimes to an outright crawl. Even Microsoft acknowledges that the Indexing Service can cause hard drives to thrash and that it “uses lots of pagefile space and lots of CPU time”—in fact, Microsoft often recommends disabling it. Note, however, that Vista’s integrated search and indexing system is considerably improved.

There are several ways to turn off XP’s Indexing Service. The most thorough is to open the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then open Services. Scroll down to Indexing Service and double-click it. Change the Startup type to “Disabled.”