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Spotlight's Impact on PowerBook Battery Life?
Viltvodlian Deoderan asks: "So, Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger is very cool. I can now let my innate ability to disorganize things shine through. However, when using my PowerBook unplugged, it seems that my battery lasts a noticeably less time. A close reading of Ars Technica's description of how spotlight works suggests that this is due to keeping the index file up-to-date on disk. Has anyone else noticed the same thing? Does someone have a better explanation for why my battery seems to drain out, prematurely? Is there some way real-time indexing can be turned off to conserve power?"
Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either, as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp.
Widgets really aren't that big a harm, unless you install and use a hundred of them. Frankly, on my iBook, I use 3 widgets, and could live without 2 of them (the TV guide I won't give up).
Mail.app has never been that great, in my opinion, but I have a general problem with all mail utilities, so I'm not going to attest to anything here.
Tiger's still a kitten, in my opinion. A few service patches later I feel it'll start to come into its own, but right now, it's not the best. Keep in mind that Apple has this record of things not being exactly the best on release. It's a work in progress, and it's still better than it's competitors in my book.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I've noticed that lithium batteries sometimes degrade so rapidly (after 18 months or more of reliable service) that people sometimes associate the battery performance problem with some event -- a software upgrade or application install -- which was coincident with the battery demise. Sometimes they are so certain of the causality of the association that they won't buy a new battery.
... *not* ... *open* ... *nuclear cannister* ...
Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life. Well, long by today's standards. I'd like a battery that could last a year, but I'm concerned by my own temptation to disassemble things to see how they are made...
*must*
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
Every time you modify a file, it is re-indexed. If you are downloading a lot of files, or touching a lot of files, then it is a good idea to add the folder containing them to the privacy list in the Spotlight settings in System Preferences. I have ~/tmp set to ignore, and I do anything here that I don't mind not being indexed. Although considering how rarely I use Spotlight, I should probably add a lot more...
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"Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"
False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.
"as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp."
How about comparing apples to apples? You're comparing an 192 MB RAM machine with XP, to a 512 MB RAM machine with Tiger. We're talking more that 2.5 times difference in memory size. _If_ that's the kind of difference needed to make Windows XP swap like Tiger, then you're just telling me that Tiger is a horrible memory hog.
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