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How to Download Full MacOS Installers the Easy Way with MDS

Feb 3, 2021 - 15 Comments
How to download full macOS installers with MDS

Downloading complete macOS installers has long been possible via the App Store and from Apple CDN and the command line, but some users encounter difficulties with those approaches, or find them too cumbersome. Another option is to download a full macOS installer by using an app called MDS. MDS stands for Mac Deploy Stick and … Read More

How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Mavericks & Mountain Lion

Dec 10, 2011 - 74 Comments
Enable Spotlight in OS X Lion

Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More

mds – what MDS process is and why it uses CPU on the Mac

Aug 5, 2010 - 47 Comments

If your Mac is suddenly running sluggish and you launched Activity Monitor, you may notice a process named ‘mds’ cranking away at 30% and even up to 90% CPU utilization. If you see this, don’t worry, it’s not abnormal behavior and your Mac isn’t crashing, it’s just indexing it’s built in search engine. What is … Read More

mdworker – What is mdworker?

Sep 14, 2009 - 31 Comments

Ever wondered what the ‘mdworker’ process was on a Mac? mdworker is short for ‘metadata server worker’ and if you’re still confused don’t feel bad. mdworker is basically the core technology behind Mac OS X’s awesome search engine Spotlight, it spiders meta data from your Mac and its files and creates a readable index so … Read More

Spotlight won’t work? Fix a broken Spotlight menu with these troubleshooting tips

Feb 15, 2007 - 122 Comments

Spotlight is probably the greatest feature to hit the Mac OS in years, once you get used to using it, going to a PC without it feels hopelessly inadequate. I use Spotlight for everything from launching applications, retrieving pictures, searching for old emails, literally just about everything. If you aren’t using Spotlight, you’re missing out. … Read More

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