Computer and Web Articles

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a bold assumption: you don’t use your Windows XP built-in search every day, do you? I bet you don’t even use it once a week, right? Actually, now that I think about it, I’m going to go ahead and guess that entire months go by without you using that search functionality—yes?

I knew it! My powers of assumption appear to be incredibly on-point today. So now that we’ve confirmed you don’t use XP’s built in search on a regular basis, let’s take advantage of this information to speed up your computer a bit, shall we?

Today we’ll be turning off your Windows Indexing Service, a service that reduces the performance and speed of your computer by constantly, furiously running in the background in an effort to update an index of alllllll the files on your system—just so that your Windows XP searches will execute as fast as possible. You know, those searches you never conduct.

All we need to do to give our Windows Indexing Service a well needed, permanent rest is…

• Click on Start > Control Panel
• Click on Add/Remove Programs
• Look over in the left-hand column of the window that pops up. Click Add/Remove Windows Components
• Uncheck Indexing Service
• [Bonus tip: If you never use Windows Messenger (and it’s very likely you do not), uncheck that box too!]
• Click Next, then Finish.

Now just look how fast your computer is zooming about! All done, great job.