Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5
It seems like people either love or hate Spotlight, if you love it then ignore this tip, but if you hate Spotlight and want to turn Spotlight off in 10.5 here’s your new favorite post. You can completely disable Spotlight in OS X 10.5 by moving a few system files (or you could delete them but that is strongly not recommended for various reasons). Here are the files you should move, be sure to place them in another location for backup in case you want to enable Spotlight again.
Disable Spotlight
Move these two files to another safe location and then reboot your mac
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
If you want to re-enable Spotlight just move those files back to their original location, reboot, and Spotlight will work again. Please backup the files, if you delete them you will not be able to re-enable Spotlight without a system reinstall!
hello,
i also hated spotlight slowing my system down and did EXACTLY as you desribed here. and now my computer doesn’t even START. i hear the chime, i see the gray apple logo and the spinning wheel then it reboots itself, then again and again and again..
do you have any idea how can i solve this problem, or restore the files that i deleted (i have backups)..?
thanks
Thanks for the tip. My Leopard mac is using 10% less memory (initially @ startup) with Spotlight shut off. This tip completely removes it from the menubar and stops indexing. I never ever have used spotlight, because I guess I’m not lazy?
I need help, so i sent the above files to my dropbox and of course spotlight was gone just like i originally wanted cause i never used it’s menubar feature. but i realized, whoops! this just shuts it off completely and i can’t search my finder. which i didn’t think the two were connected. so i did as you said and put the files back in their proper places, but i still can’t search in my finder. What might have happened and what can i do to fix it?
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE IS CORRECT ONLY FOR DISABLING SPOTLIGHT. IT’S INSTRUCTIONS FOR RE-ENABLING SPOTLIGHT DO NOT WORK.
The disabling part worked. I just tried to enable Spotlight again by returning the files to their proper directories and rebooting as indicated above, and Spotlight is still disabled. It is the same situation as the comment above. Please either respond with an explanation of how to re-enable Spotlight properly, or remove this article so that others don’t make the same mistake of relying on it.