Windows Vista will be continuously monitoring files on your computer to optimize the searching through these files. While this can be very handy, it has the potential to severily slow down your system.

Therefore, it’s a good practice to turn off this feature when you feel your system is running slow. To do so:

• Select Start and type “index options”, without quotations
• After the Indexing Options are loaded, click the Modify button.
• Then click Show all Locations
• A list of locations will be displayed in the form of a tree. Uncheck those folders which you do not want to be indexed. You can also use the Advanced button to specify file types to be indexed, but this part is optional.
• Click OK button to finalize.

This will effectively turn off the Indexing feature in Vista.