Windows Indexing Service

From ITS Wiki - Information Technology Services - University of Rhode Island

The Windows Indexing Service was designed to make searching faster by retaining a cache of the entire hard disk.

Disabling Indexing

1. Go to the Start menu and choose Run.
2. Type in services.msc and click OK. The Services dialogue will launch.
3. Right-click on the Indexing Service to bring up the Properties dialogue, and click Stop if the service is running. Then select Disabled. Click Apply and close the dialogue.
4. Go to My Computer. Next, select (Local Disk C:) under "Hard Disk Drives".
5. Right-click on the (Local Disk C:) icon and choose Properties from the right-click menu. The Local Disk Properties dialogue will pop up. Near the bottom you will see a tick box beside the option: "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" (the option will not be available on all systems, so don't worry if you don't see it).
6. Clear the tick box, click Apply, and in the next dialogue, select the option "Apply changes to C:\, subfolders and files." Click OK, and reboot.