Disable Spotlight indexing, save battery life

Question

I am using my laptop with very limited battery availability. I need to save as much battery as possible.

• I would like to disable Spotlight indexing, how do I do that?
• What else should I disable, even temporarily, to truly maximise savings? Services? Unix daemons? Is there a list?

Thanks.

PS I have already:

• dimmed keyboard backlight (on a MacBook Pro)
• switched off WiFi (apart from this post)
• dimmed screen backlight
• disabled discrete graphics
• closed non-vital apps

Answer 1

Well, the immediate way is:

sudo mdutil -i off /

from the command line (you will have to enter your admin password) to stop indexing immediately.

You might also want to add the following step:

sudo vim /etc/hostconfig

(you might want to use a different editor than vim, YMMV)

Then, navigate to the entry

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

and change it to

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

SAVE the changes the exit the file. BTW, have a look at iFixit on how to change the battery, it seems you could have much better use of the laptop that way.

Answer 2

I don't know if it'll really save anything battery-wise, but you might try defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES and then using cmd-K to quit the Finder.