Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

tkmd · Nov 21, 2007, 09:12 AM

I do a considerable amount of studying at a coffee shop. To save effort I carry my PB with me that has the pdf textbooks on it if I need to look something up for reference. If I do a spotlight search within the preview search window the cpu parks itself at 100% while it indexes this 900 page pdf.... Its a pain when I'm battery power and most importantly shouldn't of leopard indexed this when I first copied the .pdf over to the pb HD?

Big Mac · Nov 21, 2007, 09:14 AM

Oversight in Preview's programming I guess. Is Adobe Reader any better?

tkmd · Nov 21, 2007, 09:26 AM

Hmm, never thought of that AR option. I wonder if its quick....

eggman · Nov 21, 2007, 09:40 AM

Originally Posted by tkmd

... shouldn't of leopard indexed this when I first copied the .pdf over to the pb HD?

I expect that Spotlight indexed your PDF when your copied it to your hard disk... but I'd also imagine that Spotlight only tracks the existence of any given search string in a document, not its multiple occurrences within it.

When searching within Preview, it's looking for each instance of the search string to provide the ability to highlight each and every hit... and allow you to click on the search result pane to jump to that place in the document... which would be an entirely different order of indexing than Spotlight performs.

I'm not surprised that it's a big CPU hit on a 900 page document, But that's what CPU is for... and I wouldn't expect it to cache your results, because you're likely to be trying to find different matches on subsequent searches.

EricTheRed · Nov 21, 2007, 10:17 AM

Personally I wish I could turn off spotlight. 10.4.10 was much faster if for the only reason spotlight wasn't trying to index every possible thing it can get its hands on from web pages to the 2TB of HDD content. Worse, I rarely used spotlight in the first place because it is slow to find and I'd had to wait for the stupid application to slowly spin up four internal HDDs one HDD at a time. Groan.

eggman · Nov 21, 2007, 10:21 AM

Eric, have you tried excluding those volumes from being indexed by Spotlight using the Privacy Tab of the Spotlight Preference Pane?

Works like a charm for me. I only have one drive indexed, and the rest of my attached drives are excluded... but you could 'em exclude them all.

TETENAL · Nov 22, 2007, 04:53 AM

Originally Posted by tkmd

If I do a spotlight search within the preview search window the cpu parks itself at 100% while it indexes this 900 page pdf.... Its a pain when I'm battery power

It takes a few seconds at most. That has no significant influence on battery power.

EricTheRed · Nov 24, 2007, 03:11 AM

Originally Posted by eggman

Eric, have you tried excluding those volumes from being indexed by Spotlight using the Privacy Tab of the Spotlight Preference Pane?

Works like a charm for me. I only have one drive indexed, and the rest of my attached drives are excluded... but you could 'em exclude them all.

I checked all my HDDs but the Mac is still indexing something as I'm still waiting to get it to do things after I've got the desktop and finder loaded. For me, Leopard is slower than 10.4.10.