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?"

Comments

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[ciroknight]

No, I've experienced this too with a quite new iBook. Before Tiger I'd get battery life of just under 6 hours. Afterwards I'm lucky to get 5.

I believe it's correctly attributed to Spotlight, as every now and again, even when the machine is sitting plugged in and resting on my kitchen counter, I can hear it whirl it's harddisk as if it's indexing.

I would like a control panel applet to tune Spotlight, but I can wait. I already did my part in the deal (gave them an email and a submission on their website).

And for the trolls of the world, Apple's not perfect either. This is the first time this kind of tool has been included in an operating system, and it's something that will take quite a bit of time to tune and work out correctly. To be honest, in all of my works to do something similar, I've came out with the same results to a much lower quality, and any tool I've seen to do the same will probably harm my battery's life even more.