One relatively undiscussed feature of Vista, which I've touched on here in the past, is the Reliability and Performance Monitor, a quick-and-dirty way to find out exactly what's using what resources in your machine. A common complaint about Vista is that the hard drives are always churning, which is in turn often attributed to the indexing service. Sometimes that is indeed the case, but what if it's some other piece of software, and you want to find out whether or not the indexer is really the culprit?
To launch the R&PM, just hit Start and type perf in the Search box; it should be one of the first things that comes up. You'll need to say yes to a UAC prompt, and then you'll be presented with the R&PM main interface. Click Disk to expand the disk-access panel, and look for SearchIndexer in that list (you can click on the "Image" column to sort by process name to speed things up).
In this particular example, I've sorted by the "Write" column (which is expressed in bytes per minute). The SearchIndexer.exe process is indeed at the top of that list, but it's only written 500K or so in the past minute of time (which is a miniscule amount of disk activity). The "Response Time" column is also a strong clue as to how much of a hog that particular process is: 10 milliseconds is relatively small. So any disk-bashing that might be taking place wouldn't be the fault of the indexing service.
My way to determine what's bashing the disk is to sort by both Read and Write columns (and Response Time), and see what comes to the top of the list after a minute or so. If the results are an application, then you can look into any possible problems with that app.
