After upgrading XP to VISTA recently, my hard disk seems getting a lot busier than before. It is very annoying, especially during a quiet mid-night. You just feel VISTA keeping f*k your HD, even you are doing nothing!

Check the 70+ processes running at background, which none of them is my application, no Visual Studio 2008, no IE, no firefox, no Photoshop...... just VISTA servies!!! One process is really bringing my attention, "searchindexer.exe". It belongs to VISTA new Windows Search Service. In theory, all those sort of indexing service should running when your PC is idle, but this indexer seems very like to compete with other processes. It normally takes 1-7% of CPU, takes more when copying stuff, and uses even more when some heavy processes running. It really kills the overall performance of your VISTA box.

To stop it is very easy, just go to "Service" in whatever way you want to. My way is Win+R, services.msc. Find out "Windows Searh", stop and disable it. I read some other blog, people always left comment to argue index service is light weight service, it has very low IO. But the truth is, after disable it, I can feel there is less hard disk activity.

Another annoying service is superfetch, as describ by Microsoft

"Windows SuperFetch enables programs and files to load much faster than they would on Windows XP–based PCs."

Mmmm, maybe. But it eats me so much memory for the preload applications which I may not use. I never do some testing to see how much I can benifit on openning an application, but at the mean time, it takes me lots of memory, and make VISTA load like a tortoise.

Note: I killed both services on my machine, but it doesnt mean I suggest you doing this as well. using a common phrase "You are at your own risk" to do this. ^_^