Disable the Disk Indexing Service
Windows XP has a feature called 'Indexing Service' which will speed-up file searching on hard disk drives with the NTFS file system. Let's say you search all bmp files stored on your disk using the Windows search function. At the first search it will take some time to find all files. If you then do a second search for the same files they will be found much faster because Windows has indexed them while doing the first search.
However, Windows uses an amount of your available memory for the Indexing Service. You can disable this feature in order to free some RAM. Double-click on "My Computer", then right-click your hard disk drive and select "Properties". In the following Window uncheck the box labeled "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching".
Click the "Apply" button. A new dialog window appears. Make sure that "Apply changes to C:\, subfolders and files" is chosen and click the "OK" button.
Now it can take some time to change the attribute of every single file on your disk. If you get any error messages during this, just click the "Ignore All" button.
Repeat the steps mentioned above for every NTFS drive you own. Remember that the Indexing Service is only available on disks with the NTFS file system. FAT32 drives don't have this feature.