Windows 11 Indexing is paused

cortana search icon

gpedit.msc run

opens the group policy editor

computer configuration>administrative templates>all settings

enable "disableindexerbackoff"

close everything and restart the machine.

The indexer now says indexing in progress and the pause buttion is not greyed out.

What happened?

Windows indexing overheats laptops. It runs at about 20% where likely it should be running at about 12%.

Because of this I run my fans all the time.

I suspect they turn off indexing when fans are running but I'll leave that to someone else to figure out.

I have to keep my fans on so indexing doesn't damage the machine. And I recommend putting it one an external cooler as well.

I've wasted a full week on this garbage, again.

The real way to prevent indexing from melting a laptop is to QUIT ERASEING INDEXES AND CAUSING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN LOST PRODUCTIVITY. THE INDEXING PROCESS SAYS WINDOWS 10 SO WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE REDONE EVERY FEW MONTHS <removed>

Microsoft should also put back the ability to switch off of indexing for email if the index is rebuilding. It is stupid to not find an email you can see just came in when turning off indexing will work. The only thing you need is to tell us when its done for the non-index serach.

Or microsoft could index the pst files first. find the dates on the pst files find the latest date. that group of files does first. look to see if one of those is the outlook default view. do that one first out of the group.

I have a dell so it could also be something to do with battery charging like waiting for my machine to reasch 100% where its set to cycle from 50% to 80% for long battery life.

If its the fans then indexing shuts off with fans so it never runs and never completes?

After all my work I find Microsoft added a feature that is virtually undocumented and all the <removed> experts on their forum are just parroting garbage.

If you have AI maybe it would have asked what is the fans are on 100%, wouldn't that mean indexing never works and email search is permenently disabled costing billions of dollars in lost productivity.

<remove - not relevant to thread>

I also think showing the latest filenme to be processed would be helpful. If not recognized then maybe that is a subdirectory that might be excluded.

DON"T DISABLE MY MACHINE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION

You need to do better.

As soon as I made the above changes the "Paused" warning went away and the Pause button returned. The frequency of items discovered went up dramatically.

Thanx LivingRoom2 for providing this information. Why is it that with all of the resources Microsoft has, all of the people and data handling capability, that they can never provide answers to the resolve the stupid issues their software people create!

This worked for me. Thank you for saving my sanity!

This workaround works for me:

1. Bring up the “Edit group policy” control panel by typing ‘group’ in the search bar.
2. Enable 'Disable indexer backoff':

3. Disable 'Prevent indexing Microsoft Office Outlook':

4. Disable 'Prevent indexing when running on battery power to conserve energy'':

For me, I believe all three were necessary to work around this problem.

Hi ,

I have Windows 11 - This problem of indexing has been happening since ive taken Windows 11

I tried doing the above mentioned solution ... but im getting an error now

" Error 1053:The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion "

Pls advise what to do now