Tweaking spotlight

Spotlight generally causes disks to slow down and uses a lot of CPU cycles. The command-line utilities find, grep and locate are more efficient and run on-demand rather than randomly starting up and making your disk busy. If you find you can't eject a disk, it's generally because spotlight is using it.

To permanently turn spotlight off for every disk:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Warning: if you do that, you won't be able to search using the magnifying glass tool in the menubar.

To turn off spotlight for any attached (USB) disk:

sudo defaults write /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration Exclusions -array "/Volumes"

To turn off spotlight for any specific disk:

sudo mdutil -a -i off /Volume

 

rm /.metadata_never_index 

 

mdutil -i on /



Popular posts from this blog

Chunk validation failed

When installing Mac OS from the command-R internet recovery boot up, you can use command-L to show the logs. Sometimes you will find that the installation does not happen and you see an error "Chunk validation failed". Apparently this means your SATA cable or hard drive is faulty.  https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/258522/mountain-lion-reinstall-failure
Read more

The most useful defaults-write options

The following are really useful options to set system-wide for Mac OS X. I'd suggest reading them to guess what they do. You should be able to safely run all of them except the first one which tells spotlight (the search function) to ignore any attached drives forever. If you find that drives take a long time to unmount (eject), then usually it is because spotlight is indexing them (reading them in their entirety) to see what they contain. Hence if you find a disk doesn't want to eject, turn off spotlight for that drive. sudo defaults write /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration Exclusions -array "/Volumes" defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int X defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 10 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 7 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5 springboard-columns -int 10 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int X defaults w
Read more

Migrating from Windows to Mac

If you have decided to migrate from Windows to Mac, you will find that there are a few confusing differences. I note the ones that I can think of, below: 1. There are ALTERNATIVE packages to microsoft office installed, namely Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, and Apple Keynote . These replace Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and if you use them you can use the " save as " command to create a word, excel or powerpoint document. This means you do not need to actually buy MS Office, these work just fine. 2. I recommend AVG antivirus be installed . This is mostly so that if you accidentally go onto a bad website with bad software on it, or a fake website, e.g. a "phishing" site, which is trying to trick you into giving your banking credentials, it will warn you. There are almost no viruses or malware for the machine. HOWEVER , there is ONE piece of malware which pretends to be good software, available, and it calls itself MacKeeper. Do NOT install it. AVG complains a lot on W
Read more