[mrgalaxy]

Finder just relaunches when you force quit it in Activity Monitor? Is there something else you had to do to get it to not relaunch?

Also, I'm not sure how much you are saving by doing that. My Finder uses 0% CPU when not being actively used.

[clairity]

mine doesn't relaunch, but i honestly don't remember how i changed that behavior, sorry!

dunno why, but my finder uses 2-5% constantly when running, and spawns a bunch of other processes (like mdworker) as well, which also suck away battery. better to keep it off for me.

[nicwolff]

mdworker is what keeps your simple Spotlight file search working ツ