Indexing, on or off?

no. i said that wolf04 is one of those persons randomly disabling something out of some random fear about something that has no reason to fear about.

so in essense, he got some false information from somewhere, believed it, and acted with, according to that information, the right thing. but as it's a false information, his action was wrong, too.

to you i say explore the new os features, and try to find uses to be more productive and more efficient. because that's what they are for. to make your life more easy.

and the trick is, disabling will not
a) enhance your systems performance
b) save your hdds life
c) save hdd space

or anything else of that kind in any way affecting your system, or your experience. so disabling it gives you no gain. leaving it enabled MIGHT give you a gain one day where you notice how useful the feature is.

so having it enabled is more intelligent.

 

He's just offering his opinion, nothing more. Everyone has their own ways of running their pc, but sometimes people do things because of old habits or false information.

I turn indexing off.

 

I'm one of those persons randomly disabling something out of random fear? False information?

I don't know where you're getting these assumptions because I said calmly my reasoning and I was OPEN to being corrected if I was wrong and if it's a myth. I wasn't stuck-up and I sad, "NO, you're wrong and I'm right". And how would you know where I got the information from and if it's false?

Like surfasb said and I agree, there's isn't enough information to backup either claim, this means that you can't disprove the theory that indexing MAY cause degradation but it could also mean that it may not, since there are so many variables at play. So instead of assuming so many things, maybe your post should provide accurate information to prove me wrong instead.

Regardless, there is a reason why Microsoft has that little option under local disk properties, so people are given the freedom to run their OS how they want based on their usage behaviour.

 

i can disprove the theory of the added danger by estimating the amount of additional disk writes indexing will take: hint: it's at most around 1% of your actual data, most likely much less.

so even if disk writes would somehow hurt your disk (which they won't, else we would have such knowledge since years), the indexing itself would not really affect it compared to anything else you do, as indexing does NOT create much additional workload.

the little option under local disk properties is actually deprecated and NOT windows search.


so, in short: there is a chance, that is so small that it's not measurable, that disk writes could affect disk life. and then, you can disable something in the os that reduces the amount of disk writes by a minimal amount. and then you argue that this can't be somehow useless.

i can't follow this logic. that's like, in the billions spent on something like the iraq war, it matters if somewhere, one has bought an extra coke for his own pleasure for a dollar or two.

 

I have to agree with you here on his motives.

My basic assumption is: Do not use Start Menu apart from times when I hit it to shut down or restart.

I configured the new taskbar the way I like and have EVERYTHING on it

 

Well, to provide some real-world input, like I mentioned before, I have an extensive amount of information indexed (all of my email and user documents, totalling about 150,000 items right now, with typically a couple of hundred added per week), and the effect of this on the performance of my machine is demonstrably as close to zero as it gets. Indexing will automatically get out of the way if the machine has other things to do, and the incremental effort to index new items is tiny in any case.

Fairytales regarding the performance impact of indexing are typically due to ignorance. Indexing will lead to some disk activity for initial setups. Of course, when I move to a new computer, that machine will be busy indexing for quite a few hours to get those many thousands of items scanned. However, once that has happened, the impact of indexing is virtually non-existent.

 

Well, that's good to know. On my ancient Toshiba with XP, I thought indexing was horrible and slowed down my system considerably (it was always busy working) and my hard-drive failed after 2 years as well.

Regardless, I'll turn it on to see if there's any impact. To be honest, I don't even use search that much. I have all my documents organized and I know where they are but I guess with index searching, I can learn to be more productive by gaining quicker access to the files instead of clicking through folders.

 

Well, it's worth a try; you can always turn it back off. Just to be clear, I am not telling anybody what to do about Windows Search, one way or another. There's a reason the option to turn it off exists. All I am saying is that the indexing service will not notiecably impact your system performance, even if you're a gamer, unless some software has installed a buggy search filter for you. I haven't heard of any such cases, but I suppose that could happen.

Oh, and, yes, in XP and before the indexing service was slow, and half broken on top of that. In my experience, you really had to turn XP's indexing service and related search functionality off if you wanted to have any hope of being able to reliably search for files...