Windows – How to disable Windows Search Indexing Service while on battery on Windows 7

windows 7

Since upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, I've found laptop battery life is reduced.

One issue is that the Windows Search Indexing Service is constantly running, even when on battery power. Using Resource Monitor shows it is often the top consumer of CPU time and top producer of disk activity. I imagine this is one of the primary reasons the battery is getting drained faster.

I cannot find any options to tell Windows Search Indexing Service to not index while on battery power.

The only solution seems to be to stop the service, and also disable the service (if you just stop it, it will restart itself after a while). Doing this gives me considerably more battery life, but it's a pain because I have to re-enable the service when plugged in again.

Is there a better solution?

Best Answer

There's a group policy setting for this. Go to Start -> Run (or Winkey+R), type gpedit.msc. Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Search. Enable the policy "Prevent indexing when running on battery power to conserver energy"

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Windows 7: Search indexing is stuck

I think you could be correct when you say that there's a corrupted file that causes it to hang. A crude way of trying to identify the file is to go the files tab and turn off half the files types from being indexed. Let it run. Either it completes or it stops. If it stops, turn off half again. If it completes, you know the bad file type is in the other half. Doing this should allow you to identify the bad file type.

Also, look through the file list that's indexed. File types have different search providers, like HTML, plain text and so on. Are there any that look out of place, that might have been installed by some third party application?

Another idea is let the search hang on the 4,317th file. Then run a command prompt. Type

CD c:\
DIR /s /TA /O-D >c:\newt.txt

This will create a file named newt.txt that will hold all of the files and the last time they were accessed. Accessed, meaning read, not modified. You'll have to search through the file with a file editor but look for the last several files that were modified. If we're in luck, your bad file will be in there. Good luck!

Windows 7: prevent indexing on newly attached external drives

What I've done is a quaint work around but works reasonably well for my purposes. Simply:

Open your "Services" components (I go through the task manager->Services->click "Services" button);
Find "Windows Search", double-click;
Switch to "Recovery" tab;
Enter "180" into the field for "Restart service after: ____ minutes", which is 3 hours;
Click "Apply";
Click over to "General" tab and click "Stop";

The service will stop taking the SearchIndexer.exe app with it. It shouldn't restart for 3 hours. Anytime in the future you only need to terminate the application through the task manager and you gain 3 hours of no indexing services to work from your externals without losing the functionality altogether.

Hope that helps.

Best Answer

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