Mac OS X tunning tips

I am experimenting with some tunning strategies in my mac and, of course, will be sharing with you along some topics in this blog. For now, since I am still testing whether they are all effective, I'll be sharing just two simple tips.

First of all, install Snow Leopard. Upgrade is seamless, since I have Time machine configured, I didn't even have the trouble to back up stuff, and wouldn't have needed to restore anything, anyway. It finished upgrading and everything was working, no data was gone and all programs would still work. Kinda different from a Windows upgrade, surely. However, if you use Macports, you will have to through a process of upgrading it, take a look at this: http://syntatic.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/macports-snow-leopard-upgrade/

Snow Leopard initiates faster, sleeps and wakes up faster and occupies less space in my disk. Those are all the reasons needed for upgrading. But other reasons are 64bits, multicore and OpenGL optimizations.

The other tip is disabling the Spotlight. This one may not be applicable to everyone, but I never use Spotlight, so I find it really useful to disable those indexing operations that slow down my mac sporadically. If you also want to do that, go to the Terminal.app and issue:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

 The mdutil allows you to manage metadata used by spotlight.