Technical victories

[substitute]

First, I finally got my Powerbook to stop miscellaneously slowing to a crawl several times an hour, and also got it to stop hanging on "Open" dialogs. The solutions were 1) completely and utterly disable Spotlight and 2) turn off syncing the iDisk. So I had to disable two useful features of my operating system because they were buggy and painful,

Comments

[frobisher]

Out of curiosity, what do you find so useful about spotlight. I'm sure there must be something, but I haven't found it yet...

[substitute]

I use Mail.app and you can't search mail in it without spotlight.

[frobisher]

Ah. Although I've heard rumors that this had changed, I decided a while back that Mail.app was teh suck. So, not an issue for me, then.

[frobisher]

...and, now that I think of it, how do you utterly disable spotlight. I'm tired of the powerbook spinning beach balls at me while it takes a coffee break, myself.

c/p from macosxhints.com

[substitute]

As the previous poster said, first modify /etc/hostconfig to read:

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands from Terminal:

mdutil -i off /
mdutil -E /

The first command disables indexing on the boot volume, and the second erases the existing template. You can then use Activity Monitor to kill any mds or mdimport processes or else just reboot. Futzing with permissions will probably break OS updates that try to update files in the zeroed-out directories and of course won't survive a repair-permissions run.

If you later change your mind and decide you want Spotlight after all, it's easy to reactivate. Set

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

in /etc/hostconfig, run in Terminal:

mdutil -i on /

and reboot.

[djfntstque]

http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/act/97608209.html

[substitute]

"Inland Empire fight club" is redundant.