Indexing Service and Compressing - Keep or Kill?

My son has returned from university with a slow and infected computer. We've cleaned it up fairly well with anti-spyware and anti-virus tools.

One remaining area of concern is:

His C: drive has the "Compress drive to save disk space" and "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" turned ON. I'm not certain if these were turned on when the system was new, but they are now.

Looking deeper, some folders/files have compression turned on. It seems to be random.

He has a 40 GB hard drive. The basic questions are:

Assuming free space is not a concern, is it simply best to turn both indexing and compression OFF?

And if we do that, do the files that are currently compressed suddenly expand to their actual size?

Thanks for any help and advice you can pass along.

 

I use compression for all my text data and MP3 files, but not image files- jpg and bmp etc. Compression seems to alter picture quality but I have no scientific data to back that up!

I've tried indexing on and off and never noticed any appreciable difference, so I enabled it for my OS partition, and disabled it for my storage partition.

Since you've just done a good clean up, don't forget to delete all SR points just so no bad guys come back.

Black Viper is the standard used for this handy freebie, written by one of our members, Deepesh Agarwal, Service Controller XP which makes it a snap to set all of XP's Services, to secure the PC and conserve resources.

Johanna

 

If your running low on disk space use the compress files option, otherwise don't. It will maybe save you a few hundred MBs (at best), but generally with todays drive sizes this isn't usually a big problem. Compressing can slow the system speed a fraction when accessing little used files, as compressed files need to be uncompressed when read.

Haven't found a valid reason to use the indexing service. This is one of the first things I untick (after transition effects) on an install or when tweaking a system for speed etc.

 

I agree with Paul...

I turn off Compression and Indexing right after installation. I use this procedure on all our workstations...have not had a need to turn on yet