Occassionally, the SearchIndexer.exe service in Vista can take up a lot of memory or system resources while it runs in the background. Sure you could disable file indexing altogether, but often times filtering what the computer indexes will solve the problem. For example, if you have 6+ GB of email, it might be prudent to tell Vista to keeps it’s hands off email… or the PC may spend countless hours slowing down the rest of the system.

Go to Control Panel > Indexing options > and select the index service you wish to modify, then hit the modify button. In the new window, deselect the items that aren’t worthwhile indexing. Otherwise, you can also load up Start > Administrator Tools > Services > and right click on Windows Search to select Stop, and change Automatic to Manual. This will stop windows indexing from running in the background automatically, but by setting it it manual, if you tell it to run, it will.