One settings toggle claims to index your entire PC. Sometimes that is the right answer; on a laptop it is often an expensive one. This guide grades Classic and Enhanced honestly and shows the middle configuration that beats both for most people.
People usually meet the Classic/Enhanced choice while hunting for faster search — the same hunt that starts with the video's Bing fix. But the two problems are different: Bing controls whether search also asks the internet, while indexing mode controls how much of your disk the local index watches. Confusing them leads to switching on Enhanced, watching the battery fall, and concluding search is hopeless. Here is the honest comparison.
Under Settings → Privacy and security → Searching Windows (in Windows 10, Settings → Search), the "Find my files" choice decides the index's territory. Classic indexes the standard libraries — Desktop, Documents, Pictures and your profile's usual folders. Enhanced indexes essentially the whole PC: every drive, every folder, the lot. Enhanced genuinely does make more files findable at index speed, and on a desktop with a big drive full of scattered project folders, that can be the right call. This page exists because Enhanced is also the setting most often switched on by someone chasing faster search — when it usually delivers the opposite first impression.
Enhanced mode's cost is paid in three currencies. Time: the first full pass over an entire PC can take many hours, during which search is incomplete and the indexer is constantly busy. Power: that indexer work is CPU and disk activity, and on a laptop it is paid from the battery — Microsoft itself warns that Enhanced indexing consumes more battery and CPU, which is why many laptops only let it run fully while plugged in. Size: a database describing your whole PC is far larger than one describing your libraries, and it churns harder as files change. On a mains-powered desktop with fast storage these costs are modest. On a laptop that lives on battery and a nearly full SSD, Enhanced can be the reason the fan runs through meetings.
For most machines the best configuration is neither default-Classic nor full-Enhanced, but Classic plus your own additions: stay in Classic mode, then use the "Add an excluded folder" / customise-locations options — or Indexing Options → Modify — to add the specific work folders that live outside your profile, and stop there. You get index-speed answers for the folders you genuinely search, without paying to catalogue every cache, game install and system directory on the disk. Reserve true Enhanced for the plugged-in workstation whose owner honestly searches everywhere — and if you switch it on, give it a full plugged-in day to finish before judging whether search improved.
Indexing mode decides what local search can find; the video's script decides that the internet stays out of it. Together they are the full setup.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIt can be. A plugged-in desktop with fast storage pays the indexing cost once and mostly forgets it, and owners who genuinely scatter work across many drives get real value from whole-PC coverage. Judge it after the initial indexing has fully finished — a day, not an hour.
Because the indexer is crawling every file on the machine, which is sustained CPU and disk work. It settles once the full pass completes, but on battery the ongoing maintenance still costs more than Classic. If the noise bothers you, return to Classic and add only your work folders manually.
No — after the initial crawl, maintenance indexing is incremental and throttles itself while you work. The permanent costs are a larger index database and somewhat higher background activity. The initial build is the expensive part, which is why judging Enhanced in its first hours misleads everyone.