Cannot compress and spotlight taking forever.

[steffi]

Two problems.

Spotlight in Snow Leopard 10.6.2 saying estimating indexing time forever

and

whenever I try to compress a folder it nearly finishes but stops with 5 seconds left and just sits there forever.

 

[spinnerlys]

Have you tried repairing permissions or your disk via Disk Utility yet?

 

[steffi]

Have you tried repairing permissions or your disk via Disk Utility yet?

Lets get this out of the way first then.

1. Yes repaired permissions

2. Yes repaired disk

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

Checked the activity monitor?

 

[spinnerlys]

What kind of Mac and what HDD do you have, and how old is the HDD?

 

[steffi]

What kind of Mac and what HDD do you have, and how old is the HDD?

13.3 MacBook Pro with 160 GB X-25M G1

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

13.3 MacBook Pro with 160 GB X-25M G1

I feel like my question was more relevant. You should probably answer that one.

 

[steffi]

Checked the activity monitor?

What should I be looking for?

 

[spinnerlys]

What should I be looking for?

Select Show All Processes and sort by CPU use.

Monitor the CPU and Disk Activity while you want to compress a file/folder and monitor the CPU and Disk.
Also look for a process called "mds", as that is Spotlight.

Maybe make a screen shot or report the usage, and that may explain the issue.