Unfortunately, although this fix lasted for about a week, now I find I'm having to do it several times a day (not very productive when I'm working on deadlines). I'll note that in my case, the startup type has always been set already to automatic - so, I switched it to manual (apply/ok), then back to automatic (apply/ok), then restart the computer and - fine. After doing some googling, I came upon one 'fix' - hit WinKey + R, then services.msc, then Windows Search > Properties, then change 'startup type' to automatic. However, in the past three weeks, after working absolutely fine for most of the day, the search will stop functioning out of the blue. My first course of action was to rebuild the index (which took forever), and which seemed to have helped. In the past couple of months there have been numerous instances where, when searching in windows explorer, any term I enter in the search box will simply return 'No Items Match Your Search' (even though I know/can see that there are files in the folder with names matching the search term exactly). I'm using a Surface Pro 4 as my 'laptop' (external keyboard and monitor), and because the hard drive isn't terribly large, I use it with a large external hard drive. A very frustrating problem that seems to have come out of nowhere.