Computing excessively slow

Hi everyone,

I have a MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.16Ghz.

I have noticed that several times a day, the hard drive starts spinning
excessively and everything on the computer grinds to a crawl. Programmes
take for ever to boot up and web pages take ages to appear.

I thought something could be indexing the system.

I currently have Spotlight and Launchbar installed but can't find out
where to set up how often they index the system.

About a year ago, I also installed Google Desktop. I uninstalled it but
could something from that have been left on my system?

Thanks for any advice you may be able to give.


Danny

In article ,
Danny Parker wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.16Ghz.
>
> I have noticed that several times a day, the hard drive starts spinning
> excessively and everything on the computer grinds to a crawl. Programmes
> take for ever to boot up and web pages take ages to appear.
>
> I thought something could be indexing the system.
>
> I currently have Spotlight and Launchbar installed but can't find out
> where to set up how often they index the system.
>
> About a year ago, I also installed Google Desktop. I uninstalled it but
> could something from that have been left on my system?
>
> Thanks for any advice you may be able to give.

Once Spotlight is done creating the initial index, it won't
spontaneously reindex your entire drive. You can force it to if you
like, but the general behavior is that it catches notifications that a
file has changed and (almost) instantly refreshes the metadata for that
file.

Can't speak to the behavior of Launchbar and Google Desktop, but
depending on how you uninstalled it it's certainly possible for bits of
it to be left behind.

Heavy disk use often is accompanied by noticeable CPU utilization, so if
this activity usually takes more than several seconds you could try
opening a terminal and typing 'top'. By default that'll show you a list
of processes in reverse launch order, and you might notice that there's
something in that list that's either a high load or a highly fluctuating
load.