Set specific time to have Windows index my hard drive?

Question

Does anyone know if a particular piece of software that will enable me to control the time in which Windows 7 search feature indexes my hard drives? It would be awesome to have it only index the drives (or turn on the index service) between a couple of hours each day. It seems my drives want to index right at the worst possible moment when I am using them heavily.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There's no way to schedule the index without writing a script to stop and start the index. Fortunately, the script is quite basic.

Create 2 batch files:

StopIndex.bat

@ECHO OFF
NET STOP "Windows Search"
EXIT

StartIndex.bat

@ECHO OFF
NET START "Windows Search"
EXIT

Then go into your task scheduler and create a 2 separate tasks:

1. Start Index: point the action to the StartIndex.bat file
2. Stop Index: point the action to the StopIndex.bat file

Of Note: be sure to select the checkbox of "Run with highest privileges" under the General tab, otherwise the stopping and starting will fail.

Answer 2

Have you trued using Task Scheduler to run it or try using AutoIt v3 which works well and I have tried them both.