2. Temporarily suspend Spotlight processes when using battery
Indexing processes in the background (such as “mds”, “mdworker” etc.) use CPU power, spin hard drive and drain battery. While I find Spotlight an extremely useful feature of OSX, particularly on Leopard, I was looking for a way to disable it only for when I’m using battery.
Even though I’ve known Spotless to be able to turn off hard drive indexing and fiddled around with Privacy settings in the Spotlight preference pane, the problem with these methods is that you also delete index files, so when you turn Spotlight back on, it has to reindex the whole drive again (taking more than 1 hour on my almost completely full HD). This is certainly something you don’t want to do every other day.
So how to suspend Spotlight and keep the index file? You can turn off Spotlight temporarily by unloading mds process. Here’s the tip:
To turn OFF Spotlight temporarily, type in Terminal:
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
To turn ON Spotlight temporarily:
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Source: Nerdlogger.com
3. Freeze running apps with Blitz (UPDATE: or a similar application such as App Tamer)
When running on battery power, develop a habit to hide and suspend (freeze, pause) running apps instead of closing them if you are currently not focusing on them. An app called Blitz (there are similar apps out there as well) can help you with that.
Instead of loading/unloading applications (and using battery power to spin HD), it can be more appropriate to simply just freeze any open applications that you’re currently not focusing on (for instance hidden or minimized windowed apps), and prevent them from using any processor cycles by randomly idling in the background.
It is probably a good practice to hide the apps before freezing them, unless you like seeing spinning beachballs on your screen when hovering over a frozen app window (otherwise not problematic).
Occasionaly a process called “spindump” will show up in the Activity monitor using around 10% CPU, only to stop after a while. It’s generally not a problem.
Download Blitz: blitzapp.com
4. Turn off speakers (mute)
Not a very often mentioned method. Muting internal speakers (turning them off) or using headphones instead saves the energy used to power idle (standby) mode of internal speakers.
5. Turn off unessential background daemons and follow general tips for OSX optimization
Do take into account that tips in this post are only an extension on top of general tips for OS optimization, such as disabling Dock and other eye candy, dimming screen brightness, turning off bluetooth and airport when unused, ejecting DVDs and other general tips. I freed extra CPU cycles by turning off trackpad tools and helper daemons such as Zoooom, Evernote helper, Coversutra etc.
As with all things regarding OS optimization, keep an eye on Activity Monitor. With proper optimisation, CPU usage should be near-flat most of the time:
6. And finally: defragment (?)
I haven’t done it in a while, but fully defragmenting your hard drive is probably a healthy practice to minimize HD spinning while it searches around for scattered file fragments.
test thing (ignore):
