I disagree. I like Vista's indexing much better than Google's. XP's indexing sucks, but Vista's seems to be much better. It takes an hour or two to index your drives, then it's pretty much done, except for keeping track of what you put on from then on. To me, it's worth the initial indexing time. Indexing means that instead of waiting 5 minutes for my computer to search for a certain mp3 file, it will find it almost instantaneously. Indexing means that I can search through 200 document files for a keyword that is in the document, not just the title. I personally like it.
If you just installed Vista, the hard drive working could also be Vista installing all of the updates. When you first install it, there are a lot of updates to install.