Effectively Turn Off Spotlight

Hey

Some people hate using and having Spotligh turned on. It can use a lot of CPU and take up quite a bit of time with disk access. If you want to turn it off, there is hundreds of different methods and ways to do this. Most involve changing system files. Although this might be relatively straight forward it can produce some problems and may break the stability of your system. Todays post will show you how to turn off Spotlight without having to fiddle with anything.

Spotlight preferences are run from System Preferences Spotlight, so lets open up this preference pane. Then select Privacy from the the two tab options at the top of the window. From this option you can exclude files, folders and drives from being scanned. Its useful if you dont want certain files appearing in search results.

To effectively turn off Spotlight, press the small plus button at the bottom of the window. Here select your Macintosh Hard Drive, and any other drives you have on your system and add them to the list. What will happen now is Spotlight will exclude these files and folders from Spotlight and it probably will not add them to the index.

It is by no means a perfect solution, and you will probably find the Spotlight background services will run every so often. However if you want a quick and simple way to stop it in its tracks, this is a pretty simple way to get around this. You could go into changing background services, however that is a lot more work and a lot harder to do. If you ever want to revert this process, all you have to do is remove the hard drives from the menu.

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