One fast and simple way to speed up your PC is to turn off indexing on Windows, both XP and Vista. This is a really great and often overlooked way to speed up your PC’s performance.
If you turn off Windows indexing it means you won’t be able to use Windows search. This isn’t such a big deal though, if you want to search your computer then you can use Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop, both are great, super fast, and won’t slow down your computer.
How to Turn Off Indexing
In ‘My Computer’ right click on your local drive which could be C or D or whatever it’s called. From there click on ‘Properties’ and in the general tab you’ll see a check box which says ‘Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching’ at the bottom.
Uncheck that box and you should get a pop up box that asks you if you want to use those setting on all sub folders and files or just the root. You want to apply this to all files and subfolders because you don’t want anything indexed. It will take a while once you’ve done this because all files and folders would have already been set up to be indexed so it’ll have to go in and change all the settings.
Hopefully you found that quite simple to do. Remember that it’s simple things like this that can make a real difference to the speed of your computer. Now Windows won’t be indexing all your files and so it saves your computer some energy which will give you more speed and efficiency when you are using your PC.
You also don’t have to turn off indexing for every drive. You can have it running for one drive and not the other which is really useful because you will still see some improvements in efficiency but you’ll still be able to index the drives you really need to be indexed.