Thanks to Ann (full explanation in my next post), I’ve just finished installing Tiger, after putting it through a veritable torture test on my guinea-pig volume on a separate drive first.
I have upgraded to Tiger also on my boot drive too, but I did end up nuking the Dashboard through the Terminal, and using Spotless and Notlight to tame the abominable Spotlight.
Dashboard turned out to be even more annoying than I had remembered, so that sucker’s gone for good. A single longish command in the Terminal did it.
It wasn’t just your prodding, kidding and knocking me for being a Tiger holdout that finally made me upgrade to Tiger, indirectly it was you who got me an off-the shelf Tiger box, since it was a gift in appreciation by a friend of my wife’s for having helped her troubleshoot her setup and monitor, which I could not have been able to do without your sending me that PDF of a certain monitor manual. 🙂
My machine is maxed out at 2GB of RAM. The stupid dashboard is wasting RAM even when it’s not on. Anything you can do with a widget can be accomplished in some other way without continuously wasting valuable and limited resources.
Even after "taming" Spotlight, I kept seeing the spinning flywheel/beach ball all too often. Now I’ve nuked Spotlight alltogether and have not seen the spinning flywheel at all. Gone; period.
Ramón you might want to look into a Sonnet upgrade card I think they make a dual. It made a big difference for me when I added a Sonnet 1.4GHz to my G4 733MHz digital audio.
I’m starting a new venture and money is tight. Plus I have G5 dual core I just bought so I don’t feel its something I have to get to work productively.
You have a good computer Ramon. No need to rush out if it is working for you. I am basically doing the same kind of work I was doing when I bought my G4.
If you mean you’re still a Panther holdout, good for you.
I’m grateful for the kindness of everyone directly and indirectly responsible for giving me Tiger, but I can tell you that I’d be mightily ticked off if I had spent any money on it myself.
The upgrade is just not worth it.
As a matter of fact, I wrote Apple requesting they reimburse me for the $10 I spent on the Spotless license so I could disable Spotblight. (Yeah, right. :/)
So far, the only two benefits I’ve noticed are the two noted above (Apple’s Disk Utility repairs permissions many times faster than in Panther; and the ability to change file type of screen shots for posting them on Pixentral.)
Oh, and I’ll be able to play with the Lightroom beta, even though I won’t be able to afford the real thing when it’s released.
Doug has a G5 I believe and he won’t notice any slowdown caused by Dashboard or by Spotlight provided he allows sufficient time for the latter to do its original indexing.
I checked Activity Monitor and Dashboard is using no resources whatsoever on my machine until I open its window for the first time after re-booting AND have Widgets actively being used. And even when I have, I am not aware of ANY slowness or hesitation on this machine.
The same applies to Spotlight except when saving a new file on the HD (when it briefly fires-up to Index that file. The important thing is to preclude removable Drives from being "Indexed".
I have tried EasyFind and while it will find System files it seems MUCH slower than Spotlight at finding normal files. And what is more, EasyFind continues to use resources even after you close its window unless you actually Quit out of it
EasyFind continues to use resources even after you close its window unless you actually Quit out of it
Yup. I generally quit out of everything I’m not using. Only Photoshop and the web browser stay open continuously.
As for Spotlight, you may be right about it not being so noticeably intrusive on a more powerful machine. However, there’s one caveat: if you happen to be using Entourage or Outlook (I know, blame it on Microsoft), Spotlight will always be intrusive on any machine, as it constantly attempts to index the MS mail database, over and over and over again, ad infinitum.
The important thing for me is that, with Spotblight disabled, I haven’t seen the spinning except for two seconds after launching Acrobat (Standard).
I’ll keep on experimenting and will look into Mail.
I’m still on 10.3.9 (on a G4) and anticipate upgrading soon to a MacPro tower which will, of course, be running Tiger.
The Spotlight issue you’re noticing may be just with G4’s, but I’m curious as to whether you notice the beach ball only during the Spotlight’s initial scanning of the hard drive or every time you invoke Spotlight.
Nope. Spotblight does not discriminate against any machine. It affects all machines, although the faster ones will cope better with it, naturally.
If Spotblight is activated on my computer, it causes the spinning wheel to appear when I do just about anything (saving, opening files, switching or launching, even quitting programs, etc.), even if I’m not "invoking" it, as you put it. It just keeps checking all volumes and never ceases to attempt to index the MS database. That’s why I just disabled it.
If I ever need it for any reason, I know I can temporarily (or permanently) enable it at will through Spotless.
I dont seem to have any trouble with SBB with Spotlight. I have an MDD G4 as well. You can also tell Spotlight not to index certain things in Spotlight preferences. Or even certain hard drives.
Perhaps the reason that I have NO problems with Spotlight (and it is weeks since I have seen any appearance of the SPOD whatsoever!) is that I have never activated Entourage at all and I only ever launch IE if I need to check the behaviour of a particular website in IE. (I always Quit out of IE as soon as I have finished using the horrible thing.)
Normally I have quite a number of programs running simultaneously: most of the CS2 Suite including Acrobat Pro; Safari; Mail; Word too sometimes; and often a few other oddballs in Classic as well. And still no SPOD !
I am certainly not trying to dictate what YOU should do on YOUR machine.
But why not just TRY using the Tiger alternatives of both Mail and Safari instead before warning everybody away from both Spotlight and Dashboard when both of them work perfectly well for virtually everyone else?
If anyone else is seeing the spinning flywheel more than they would like to, do yourself a favor and disable Spotlight just to see if it makes a difference or not.
Rick I only have a gig of RAM in the G4 733 with the sonnet 1.4GHz upgrade card.
I don’t have spotlight or dashboard disabled and I don’t see the SBBD. I just switched from Entourage to mail on that machine the final one. I just use it for scanning and my wife uses it for email and her school stuff.
Tiger works much better with the faster processor. this is why I suggested the processor upgrade to Ramón. for $399 he could go from Dual 1.25 to a Dual 2.0 and it would still boot OS9.
I have nothing on my machine that is manufactured by Microsoft (including Internet Explorer.) Based on that fact plus Buko’s and Ann’s experience, I’l give Spotlight a good try before I decide whether or not to disable it.
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