I know many folks like to disable Spotlight indexing in these situations... but I never quite understood that.
Spotlight indexing totally kills performance right after a new installation, because Leopard has to index the entire contents of the hard drive. But the solution to that is simply not to use the computer (or not to expect decent performance) for one to three hours after installation.
But once the initial indexing is done (when the little blinking dot disappears from the Spotlight magnifying glass in the menubar), there's no more performance hit.
Spotlight will of course occasionally have to update its index; but those updates are brief and relatively infrequent - it's just the initial indexing that's disruptive.
That said, I do wish Apple would make Spotlight a little "smarter" in this respect - doing a fresh install of Leopard retail of course requires tons of updates to be downloaded and installed immediately via Software Update. It would be nice if Spotlight indexing could be delayed until after all that was done.
Spotlight indexing totally kills performance right after a new installation, because Leopard has to index the entire contents of the hard drive. But the solution to that is simply not to use the computer (or not to expect decent performance) for one to three hours after installation.
But once the initial indexing is done (when the little blinking dot disappears from the Spotlight magnifying glass in the menubar), there's no more performance hit.
Spotlight will of course occasionally have to update its index; but those updates are brief and relatively infrequent - it's just the initial indexing that's disruptive.
That said, I do wish Apple would make Spotlight a little "smarter" in this respect - doing a fresh install of Leopard retail of course requires tons of updates to be downloaded and installed immediately via Software Update. It would be nice if Spotlight indexing could be delayed until after all that was done.