Windows Indexing Service did cause problems
Posted by Neil Crosby on March 15, 2005 02:48 PM
Quite a while ago, I wrote about the Windows Indexing Service and how it could be used to speed up searches for files on your computer. At the time, I said that I’d report back if having the Indexing Service turned on caused any untoward effects on my computer.
Unfortunately, there were problems. For the past couple of months, some DVDs that I’ve played using PowerDVD have had very unstable playback. Video has been skipping, audio has been clipped all over the place – it’s been an unsatisfactory experience. I had thought that it was being caused by one of the applications that I’ve got under heavy development at the moment, but shutting that down had no effect. Taking PowerDVD out of full-screen mode (mostly) stopped the stuttering, as did increasing its process priority to High. Obviously neither of these “solutions” is ideal.
Thankfully, in the end, I remembered that I’d got the Indexing Service running. After turning it off, I tried running one of the DVDs that I knew that I’d had problems with. Voila! It played perfectly. So, it pretty much looks like the Indexing Service was the cause of my DVD playback problems, and for that reason I’m going to just keep the Indexing Service turned off from now on. Not that that’s going to be a particular hardship for me – I can’t remember the last time that I actually had to search for something on my computer!