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I've seen the suggestion a million times, but never thought that I needed to do it. Then the crashes started. The G5 would freeze every few hours. W-T-F? Opened Console and read the crash logs. Ends up the culprit is likely (drum roll please.........) SPOTLIGHT!

So I disabled Spotlight by including all my drives under privacy and there was a noticeable speed up in response immediately. And so far, no freezes after about 6 hours.

Very interesting... although I am not a big fan of third party search engines for my Mac, I guess they'll have to do for now.

Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming to us all...... (CSNY)

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Ends up the culprit is likely (drum roll please.........) SPOTLIGHT!

Dude-- I assassinated Spotlight on both my G5 and MacPro ages ago.

You want permanence?

In Tiger:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 4012104186" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In Leo:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 2215912892" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Spotlight is still running in Snow Leopard, but we'll see for how long.

Thank you Master. Now my effin iPhone decided not to sync properly. ARRGGGGGHH!!!!!!!

I'd like to do that too but the third party search apps I've tried have sucked.

Couldn't agree more. I love the OS search engine but not if it is going to crash my Mac!

.

What about the dashboard (for the widgets)? I heard it was advisable to kill it too. Is that so?

And FWIW, I REALLY prefer your straight-forward method of dealing with Spotlight rather than the one involved with messing with Terminal. If it's as simple as dragging everything into the privacy thing, and it works, it's much better then.

You app murderers...

All this is a temp fix for me until the new Macs come out (next month?) Then my G5 is history, my G4 is history and my MacPro and Macbook Pro come to papa...

What was that? An alarm clock?! Wha the f...

Oh, I'm awake now.

I had more trouble with Spotlight, Dashboard, and Widgets in Tiger- and when things were questionable in Leopard, I disabled all of those things there as well.

I wanted to give Snow Leopard a fair chance, so everything is still pretty much to Apple's spec for my machine. The nice thing is that Spotlight on my Snow Leopard drive will search my Tiger and Leopard drives as well. I know that not everyone is running more than one version of OSX on the same machine, so my situation may be rarer than average.

Whatever you do, make sure that Spotlight really is the source of your troubles before making any attempt to disable it.

Well that is EXACTLY why I used the privacy tabs. They're also easy to reverse if I need to use Spotlight in the future.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Well that is EXACTLY why I used the privacy tabs. They're also easy to reverse if I need to use Spotlight in the future.

Absolutely. I did the same thing about 2-3 years ago, but found that additional issues related to Spotlight were still giving me troubles. That's what drove me to totally annihilate it, which is definitely a last resort not for the light of heart.

And you well know I am not light at heart

BTW...

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion

I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like the lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you?