What happens if i disable indexing

[thomasblake222]

Hi All,

I am thinking about disabling indexed searching to free space on my hard drive - will this affect anything? - does this mean i cant search anything?

Thomas

 

[seavixen32]

Have a look at this tutorial.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/17854-index-locations-add-remove.html

And this article.

What is SearchIndexer.exe and Why Is It Running? - How-To Geek

 

[thomasblake222]

Hi Seavixen32,

Thanks for the quick reply - do you have search indexing on?

 

[mickey megabyte]

if you turn off indexing, you can't use search - it will remove the searchbox on your start-menu.

if you never use search, then you can disable indexing. you may save yourself a teensy bit of memory, but won't free up any hard drive space worth worrying about.

personally, i organise my data well, so i'm pretty sure where everything is, so i've restricted my indexing solely to my start-menu. that way i can quickly start programs by typing in the first few letters into my searchbox rather than hunt through lots of folders and subfolders to find the shortcut i'm looking for.

 

[seavixen32]

Hi Seavixen32,

Thanks for the quick reply - do you have search indexing on?

Apparently not!

 

[ReviverSoft]

will this affect anything?

Only the time required by Windows to offer you the search results.

does this mean i cant search anything?

No. You can still search for things, only the search process will take longer. This is because Windows will need to scan through your files and drives every time you search for something, as opposed to it having indexed results to refer to.

if you turn off indexing, you can't use search - it will remove the searchbox on your start-menu.

That's incorrect. It only turns off the indexing feature. The search indexing service basically scans through the files and folders on the Windows system and records information about them in an index file. The basic search functionality still works.

I am still thinking about whether or not to use it.

If you do a lot of searching on your system, you may want to leave it turned on.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Hi All,

I am thinking about disabling indexed searching to free space on my hard drive - will this affect anything? - does this mean i cant search anything?

Thomas

I have had indexing turned off for 8 or 10 years.

I don't miss it.

I gave up on Windows search tools and instead use "Everything" from voidtools.com.

It's free and lightning fast. The only limitation is that it searches for file names ONLY, not contents.

 

[mickey megabyte]

Hi Seavixen32,

Thanks for the quick reply - do you have search indexing on?

Apparently not!

View attachment 193616

that's something else, seavixen - if you hover your mouse over that entry you'll see that it's a legacy indexing option from the xp days.

check your task-manager to see if you have SearchIndexer.exe running - make sure you have 'show processes from all users' box ticked

 

[thomasblake222]

Oh, Thanks guys

I am still thinking about whether or not to use it.

Will let you know when I made up my mind.

 

[seavixen32]

You're very welcome.

Thanks for the update Mickey, I did wonder about that as soon as I'd posted the screenshot.

You're quite right, I checked Task Manager and the indexing service is running.

 

[thomasblake222]

I'm not a frequent user so I disabled it and freed up 1gb off my drive.

Once again, i want to thank everyone who has helped me make my decision!

 

[thomasblake222]

Is there anything else i can disable to free up space on my hard drive?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

You can get rid of the hibernation file if you don't use hibernation. That will save you space equal to the amount of RAM you have.

Check System Restore settings and find out how much space is devoted to it. Try a setting of 5 or 10 GB. That should give you several weeks of restore points.

Check the size of the page file.

 

[jloc]

Indexing is a good idea if you have a cluttered PC like me . If you keep everything sorted and you know where things are, you shouldn't really need it

 

[thomasblake222]

You can get rid of the hibernation file if you don't use hibernation. That will save you space equal to the amount of RAM you have.

Check System Restore settings and find out how much space is devoted to it. Try a setting of 5 or 10 GB. That should give you several weeks of restore points.

Check the size of the page file.

Thanks1

 

[thomasblake222]

Indexing is a good idea if you have a cluttered PC like me . If you keep everything sorted and you know where things are, you shouldn't really need it

True!

 

[seavixen32]

You might also want to check this tutorial.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11728-optimize-windows-7-a.html

 

[Jacee]

You might take a look at this tutorial too http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129976-hard-disk-space-free-up-recover.html