Turn off Indexing on your XP Computer

A trick that I use to make my hard drives run faster is to not allow the Indexing Service to be run on them for faster file searching. It seems kind of ironic to turn of indexing to make the drives run faster, but it does. Here's how to do it:

For all of the hard drives that you have, do this process:

My Computer -> Right Click on HD -> Properties -> Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" -> Press OK -> Click apply to drive and all subfolders -> Press OK -> Repeat this process for additional HD's

Once you complete that chain of events, browse to your Windows directory and then to the Prefetch folder (default would be C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch). Select all files in the Prefetch folder (CTRL + A) and delete them. Then restart your computer and your drives will run faster.

[I know that some people might be fishy about deleting any files that are inside the WINDOWS directory, but I promise that deleting these files is harmless. If you are concerned about doing so, copy them to another location before deleting and put them back if needed. However, I have done this in XP Home, XP Pro, and XP Pro x64 and have never had a problem doing so.]