Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tiger Spotlight Less Then Optimal

Posted by Hemos on from the slower-then-molasses dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted. Additionally, Spotlight doesn't come with a manual to teach you how to create complex queries. Most simple available queries --style popup menu selection-- are not powerful enough to be really useful. A tutorial on http://www.scribent.com/ will explain how you can optimize Spotlight's behaviour and get the most of it, but all in all it seems like Apple has been overhyping in the extremes."

3 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Turn Spotlight off, then by Silas · · Score: 5, Informative
    There are numerous hints floating around on how to disable Spotlight. I did this on a slower Powerbook, and it worked, actually making Tiger feel as fast as I would have expected with a major OS upgrade. I *really* like Spotlight, but that hardware was suffering at its hands.

    Silas

  2. Can't turn it off? by skinfitz · · Score: 4, Informative

    System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > + > (Choose your hard drives)

    Not exactly 'turning it off' but it does stop it indexing and therefore chewing system performance.

  3. Re:Links please? by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 5, Informative
    In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type.

    Well, I was about to reply to this saying it's bullshit, that spotlight is much slower than that. And of course I wanted some actual numbers to back me up. So I did a search. And I have to admit it really did find things as quickly as I could type it.

    This is a big change from when I first installed 10.4. I don't know if the indexing wasn't complete, or if they made a big improvement in 10.4.1, but now it's really, really useful. I tried several more searches and each was as fast.