What is the correct way to disable Spotlight in Leopard OS?

[Guitarman63mm]

Well, I tried use several different sudo commands about a week ago, however, some of them were meant for Tiger and such, so I ended up accidentally disabling/deleting some .plist files I shouldn't have, and somehow, my copy/paste and drag/drop stopped working, my mac had no midi services, etc. It sort of became a useless brick. Even Time Machine went crazy and deleted everything off my backup, saying it was some sort of "in progress" file.

Anyways, I decided to bite the bullet and delete everything (I couldn't even back up any of my applications which I purchased with my own hard earned money...looks like I'll have to get a torrent for them or something)
My music, videos, all gone. However, I have a clean slate for my mac, which I wouldn't like to botch up via some stupid Terminal commands that aren't specific to my version.

I'm running the newest update available, btw. I just did a software update and restarted before posting this.


Much thanks to any who can help me! (Also, does spotlight disable searches? I wasn't able to search anything either!)

(Posted this in the basic mac forum beforehand, didn't get any hits, hopefully someone here can help!)

 

[Mal]

You do realize you could have done an Archive and Install and not lost a thing (most likely), right?

Anyways, since you already did that, if you really want to disable Spotlight, have a look here. Haven't tried it, but it should work fine, and doesn't involve deleting anything so should be easy to reverse.

jW

 

[Guitarman63mm]

I've done Archive and Installs in the past, but oh well. I don't think it would have worked anyways.

Well, it appears I've found my ire! That stupid, stupid modification is what disabled me from copy/paste, drag drop, etc. I checked Activity Monitor, and mdworker is still running, although the others are gone.

Not a fair trade at all in my book. Any other ideas guys?

 

[davidg4781]

Well, I tried use several different sudo commands about a week ago, however, some of them were meant for Tiger and such, so I ended up accidentally disabling/deleting some .plist files I shouldn't have, and somehow, my copy/paste and drag/drop stopped working, my mac had no midi services, etc. It sort of became a useless brick. Even Time Machine went crazy and deleted everything off my backup, saying it was some sort of "in progress" file.

Anyways, I decided to bite the bullet and delete everything (I couldn't even back up any of my applications which I purchased with my own hard earned money...looks like I'll have to get a torrent for them or something)
My music, videos, all gone. However, I have a clean slate for my mac, which I wouldn't like to botch up via some stupid Terminal commands that aren't specific to my version.

I'm running the newest update available, btw. I just did a software update and restarted before posting this.


Much thanks to any who can help me! (Also, does spotlight disable searches? I wasn't able to search anything either!)

(Posted this in the basic mac forum beforehand, didn't get any hits, hopefully someone here can help!)

I'm just curious, but why would you want to disable Spotlight? I've found it useful, but, even before I did, I never really had an issue with it. Is there a benefit to disabling it?

And why do you need a torrent site since you lost all your applications? Can't you download them again from the website?

 

[Guitarman63mm]

Well, I restored from a Backup earlier today, and then I actually bothered to look up Spotlight. I thought it was a helper application of sorts, but it's the actually basis for searching in OSX. Disabling it isn't such a good idea, you can't search, I assume.

The sole benefit is a MUCH faster system, as the "mds" processes suck power, and you can't force quit them permanently.

 

[brand]

Well, I restored from a Backup earlier today, and then I actually bothered to look up Spotlight. I thought it was a helper application of sorts, but it's the actually basis for searching in OSX. Disabling it isn't such a good idea, you can't search, I assume.

The sole benefit is a MUCH faster system, as the "mds" processes suck power, and you can't force quit them permanently.

It sounds like your really not sure what your doing. I think it would be better if things were left alone.

 

[gnasher729]

Well, I tried use several different sudo commands about a week ago, ...

To be honest, nobody should ever use "sudo" unless they know exactly what they are doing. "sudo" means: You are on your own. If you mess anything up, it's your own fault. Don't expect any help.

If you reboot with your Leopard DVD, you may very well find that Time Machine still has a copy of your hard drive from before you started messing things up. That's why it is called Time Machine.

 

[gnasher729]

The sole benefit is a MUCH faster system, as the "mds" processes suck power, and you can't force quit them permanently.

Of course you can't; mds runs whenever it finds that there is stuff that hasn't been indexed, and if you try to force quit it all you achieve is to confuse the thing. It doesn't know anymore what it has indexed and what it hasn't, so to be on the safe side it indexes everything. The more you try to fight it and the more you mess it up, the more work it has to do to clean up your mess.

It isn't mds that wastes all the power, it is the person at the keyboard who can't leave things alone. So how much time have you wasted in your efforts to make your make faster?

 

[lostinmysphere]

Should have put the computer in target mode before reinstalling...

 

[soLoredd]

OS X is NOT Windows! You don't need to go digging into services or startup files and chip away at them with the hopes of getting your system that 1% speed increase.

 

[Guitarman63mm]

I'm getting a lot of crap about not knowing what I'm doing, I'll admit that I'm sort of in the dark on scripts. But I didn't just make these up, I searched for them, but they simply screwed it up regardless.

Before I'd ever even opened terminal, mds was using 50% of my cpu and locking up my computer as a result. That's why I wanted to stop it. I see it's unavoidable, I'll just have to keep my file paths neater or something.

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[lostinmysphere]

Actually to disable spotlight, could you not just add you "Macintosh HD" to the privacy list in the system preferences of Spotlight. Or your user folder.. etc etc...