How do I disable the Indexing Service in Windows?
Disabling the Indexing Service in Windows can improve your computer's performance significantly by saving disk space that was previously occupied by the index. As more documents are created on your disk the bigger the index becomes. The index size is between 6% to 30% of used space on your disk.
FindOnClick users may wish to turn off the Indexing Service in Windows as FindOnClick returns far faster results.
Warning! After disabling the indexing service your built-in Windows Search will stop functioning.
Disabling Indexing in Windows Vista (or newer)
1. Open My Computer
2. Select first drive in the list, right click on it and select "Properties"
3. On the General tab, uncheck the checkbox at the bottom called "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties"
4. Inside the confirmation panel make sure the "Apply changes to drive ?:\, subfolders and files" is selected, then click "Ok"
5. Inside the "Access Denied" panel click "Continue"
6. Inside the "Error Applying Attributes" panel click "Ignore All"
7. Perform the same operation for each of the drives in the list.
The Indexing Service in Windows Vista (or newer) will now be disabled.