Can I force search indexing to high priority?

[mrp04]

Is there a way to make the search indexer high priority so that it can finish faster? It says speed reduced due to user activity, but I am just browsing the web and maybe writing a word document right now. My old index was about 115k files, so this will take a while at the normal slow speed.

My index was messed up, it wouldn't find a certain file even if I searched the exact name of the file in the same folder its in!

[Brandon Live Veteran]

I run all my systems like this, wish it were still a user accessible option (it is on XP but not on Vista).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\Gathering Manager

DisableBackoff = 1

Restart the Windows Search service for it to take effect. And don't change anything else in there, or you can really mess things up.

[rajputwarrior]

I run all my systems like this, wish it were still a user accessible option (it is on XP but not on Vista).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\Gathering Manager

DisableBackoff = 1

Restart the Windows Search service for it to take effect. And don't change anything else in there, or you can really mess things up.

nice tip brandon... gonna do that on my vista box

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Actually I lied when I said all my systems run like that, my laptop generally does not.

[soumyasch]

Actually I lied when I said all my systems run like that, my laptop generally does not.

Doesn't the Fast Forward button on your indexer gadget to the same thing?

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Yes it does. This post predated my gadget :)

This tweak should be less necessary on Windows 7. It still works, but the Win7 indexer is already much faster, and already prioritizes indexing of folders you're actually looking at among other things.

[Evert]

If you'd want to tweak this setting on Windows 7 anyway, check out http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1761-Windows-Search-4-still-throttles-itself-too-much-little-known-XP-Vista-Windows-7-performance-tweak-that-works.html for details. :-)