Speed Up or Disable Windows Search Indexing in Vista

The best way to trim down the amount of processor time the indexing service uses is by trimming down the amount of files being indexed. For instance, if you don't regularly search through your C: drive, there's really no need to be indexing it.

Type Indexing into the control panel search or the start menu search box, and you should see an item called Indexing Options.

Now you can see the current list of locations that are being indexed. If you want to modify or remove locations, use the Modify button.

All you have to do to remove a location from being indexed is uncheck the box. You might have to click the Show All Locations button to see some of the default locations.

If you wanted to remove the start menu indexing, you'll need to click on Start Menu in the summary list at the bottom, and it'll automatically navigate to the item in the tree.

The start menu indexing really doesn't take much processing time though, so I wouldn't bother removing that.

Completely Disable Indexing

If you'd prefer to completely disable the indexing service, you can disable it entirely by turning off the service.

Open up Services through control panel, or by typing services.msc into the start menu search box. Find "Windows Search" in the list of services and double-click on it to open it.

Change the Startup type of the service to Disabled, and then click the Stop button to stop the service.

Now At this point the Windows Search service is completely disabled.