14 DAY TRIAL // Privacy has always been a controversial issue in the IT field because the friendly computers everybody uses may store valuable and personal data. That data once accessed by unauthorized persons could eventually cause negative consequences; therefore, users must take all the safety measures in order to keep intruders away. I bet you already experienced the unpleasant situation when a friend, a parent or another person finding himself in front of your personal computer had the curiosity to do a little "search" on your HDD.
With a well-selected keyword and one single mouse click, that person could easily get served with a list of files he or she was not supposed to see. For instance, searching for a common filename such as DSC the curious friend might come across all your pictures exhibiting you and your ex girlfriend, and that is definitely not pleasant at all. Well, this is just a simple scenario among many examples, but the privacy issue still stands. Thus, I figured you would be interested in learning a way to prevent some files to appear in the search result list when using the search function in Vista.
First of all, let's meet Vista Search Indexer. This feature gets "to work" immediately after you have finished installing Vista and functions in the background gathering information about the files stored on your HDD. It has been conceived to eat little resources allowing the user to operate the computer while Windows is collecting information. For those owning computers with low resources I advise them to deactivate this feature by following these steps:
In the search field, above the Start button, type Services and when you get the result, click on it. In the services window, look for Windows Search. You will see that its descriptions states: "Started". Double-click on it, and at Startup type dropdown menu select "disabled" immediately after you have changed the state of the service by clicking on the "Stop" button.
Playing with folder attributes
One possible solution to stop the search function revealing unwanted results is by changing the folder attributes. To do so, select the folder where you keep important and classified data, right click on it, go to Properties and then Advanced. In the Advanced Attributes window, uncheck "Index this folder for faster searching".
Changing folder attributes
Just like the method above showed, you can easily remove a single file from the index by flagging it as non-indexable. The process is similar to the one presented above, select the file (instead of a folder), go to Properties > Advanced > Advanced Attributes and uncheck "Index this file for faster searching". This way the folder where the file is will be indexed, the contents will be presented in the result list with one single exception, the file you just made "invisible".
Finally, the most efficient way to exclude files or folders from the search result list is by changing the Indexing Options. To get to this section, go to Control Panel and double-click the Indexing Options icon. In the newly appeared window, click on the Modify button which will lead you to a new window. Here, click on Show all locations and once the list with drives and partitions appeared, expand the one where the "incriminatory" data is located on. From the folder list, uncheck the directory storing the files. By doing this you are instructing Vista not to index that specific folder; therefore, the files inside won't appear in the search result list. To be sure you have removed it for good consult the "Summary of selected locations" where the folder should appear as excluded.
