Digital Collaboration Guide, a SharePoint Architect's view

Vista’s file indexing sounds like a good idea in theory: maintaining an index of files contained on the hard drive along with details of their properties to help speed up searching. But in reality searching for files is something that most people do on a very infrequent basis, so it’s wasteful for Windows to spend any time monitoring files when that processor time could be put to much better use.

It’s worth tweaking the settings so that only relevant file types are indexed. Open the Indexing Options Control Panel and click the ‘Modify’ button to choose which folders should be included in the index. Click ‘OK’ followed by ‘Advanced’ and use the ‘File Types’ tab to select which file extensions should be included.

If the feature is not needed, head to the Programs and Features Control Panel and click the ‘Turn Windows features on. Untick the box labelled ‘Indexing Service’ and click ‘OK’ before restarting Windows. File indexing can also be disabled – more on that later.

Disable time stamps

Hard drives that have been formatted as NTFS partition perform better than their FAT 32 counterparts, but there are a couple of features of the format that can hinder performance slightly. Unless a much older operating system needs to access files on the Vista machine, there’s no need for Windows to create 8.3 file names for files.

In a similar vein, the time stamps which are added to files on an NTFA drive, whether they are accessed or not, are little more than a waste of resources for most people. Thankfully, both of these features can be disabled by editing the registry.