A while back I posted about disabling the automated Windows hard drive optimisation service in order to save CPU time and prevent parallels from grinding to a halt.

I’ve since switched to VMWare Fusion and have noticed that every so often, the VMWare process consumes 100% of the CPU even though Windows is idle in the background. I figured out that the culprit was the Windows indexing service, which kicks in when the OS is idle to index files.

Simply disable the indexing service from the Windows services control panel area and that should solve the problem. I haven’t seen any negligible effect of doing this so far, Windows searches are usually pretty sluggish even with the indexer turned on!.