Comments on: How to completely disable Spotlight

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:27:06 +0000

Help, what’s happening, I meant to say

…If you choose Show All, on seeing the Spotlight results, you get a ‘Smart Folder’

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:38:30 +0000

Sorry, should read …If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’…

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:34:38 +0000

The comments from What Haveyou and WTF seem a bit strict.

If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’, and can sort the entries by name, type, and date. The whole setup seems most useful, and it’s hard to fault the design.

As for Darren’s “noisier and cooler”, I should think most of us hardly know we’ve got a drive – my 250Gb just provides an infinite amount of space and stays shtum. And I can find any text, anywhere.

You do need to turn off Spotlight sometimes, though. I was very puzzled, on mounting a 16Gb USB stick and dumping the world onto it, to see it ticking away for ever after I’d finished with it. This was the mighty Spotlight patiently repeating all its useful work on a slow device.

That’s what led me here, and thank you all very much.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:36:15 +0000

I disabled Spotlight and also removed the menu bar icon (Google it if you’re interested). Without all that indexing, I’ve found my drives generally run quieter and cooler.

By: goran

goran — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:15:09 +0000

I had the same error last night. “could not set indexing status for volume.” turned out to be major mess of the directory structure of the hard disk. I’m now restoring from a backup after formatting the hard disk.
I did install the drive patch that came a few days ago. Hmmm, maybe it’s related?

By: machinehead

machinehead — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:08:09 +0000

mdutil -i off /

gives me an error: “could not set indexing status for volume.

also I had to access root prior to this command.

any ideas?

By: dougtheslug

dougtheslug — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:22:12 +0000

What Ever and What Haveyou rock. WTF? is a goof. So shut the phukk up.

By: mdworker – What is mdworker? - OS X Daily

mdworker – What is mdworker? - OS X Daily — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:18:16 +0000

[...] Since mdworker is part of Spotlight, you’ll have to disable Spotlight to disable mdworker. Again, this is not recommended, but if you want to disable mdworker here’s a how-to guide: How to Disable Spotlight [...]

By: josh

josh — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:52:21 +0000

waah i disabled it in 10.5 by moving the two plist files as above (i just wanted to prevent reindexing during migration assistant) but now that i’ve put them back it’s still not working even though the files are there… any idea what I do now?

By: hubionmac.com » Spotlight deaktivieren

hubionmac.com » Spotlight deaktivieren — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:30:11 +0000

[...] Gerade wenn man eine Festplatte anschließt, auf der Daten unabsichtlich gelöscht wurden und man nun versuchen möchte auf diese Platte eine Datenrettung durchzuführen, startet Spotlight beflissen einen Index-Vorgangang und überschreibt vielleicht dadurch gleich einige der gelöschten Daten: Deshalb diese Anleitung, um Spotlight zu deaktivieren (eigentlich von hier): [...]

By: Training for a Mini Triathlon

Training for a Mini Triathlon — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:43:17 +0000

I don’t really know why in the world you would want to disable Spotlight, but thanks for the tips.

By: franz

franz — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:31:05 +0000

As interface designer i am allowed to agree, Spotlight totally sucks for some people.
Normally we replicate a lot off apple standards, because they are simple and work.
But with spotlight, i really don’t get the idea, its radically boiled down to a simplicity which is for me totally useless.

By: нeвидимкa

нeвидимкa — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:23:41 +0000

Вообще, честно говоря, комментарии тут гораздо прикольнейсамих постов. (Не в обиду автору, конечно )

By: tuning -> 关闭spotlight « Alin’s Blog

tuning -> 关闭spotlight « Alin’s Blog — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:00:14 +0000

[...] How to completely disable Spotlight [...]

By: Fourthletter

Fourthletter — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:59:12 +0000

Also those of us that keep our houses clean tend to know where files are, after all you save them somewhere, simply label your files correctly and put them in organised folders, in my twenty years of using macs or pcs I have never lost a file or needed to search for it.
Why run with all that overhead for no reason ?

So to get back to the point does adding the main system drive to spotlights privacy list free up as much performance as disabling it in terminal ?