Is your CPU working a lot even if you don’t do anything on your computer at all? Windows 7 has an integrated “file indexer” that will allow you to search for files quickly.
You can compare it with a search engine crawler that is crawling website. The Windows 7 indexer is crawling your files .. constantly.
Unfortunately this process can eat a lot of resources. On my x64 machine with only 2GB of DDR2 RAM I had to disable the Windows 7 file indexing, because my PC is already pretty slow. I will probably upgrade to 4GB RAM very soon. My system is using about 1GB of RAM right after a fresh reboot, which is quite a lot.
Anyway, here’s a brief explanation how to disable Windows 7 indexing.
- 1. Click on “start” and enter “services.msc” into the search field, which will fire up the service list of all Windows 7 services.
- 2. Search through the list until you find “Windows Search” (tip: press “W” and it will jump to all services starting with the letter W).
- 3. Doube-click on “Windows Search” and from the dropdown field select startup type: “Disabled”.
- 4. Stop the service.
This was quite easy. If you want to disable the Windows 7 beta expiration (because you need some more time to upgrade) it’s getting a bit more complicated: