My work laptop has slowed down a lot recently and I’ve been trying to figure out why - most of the slowdown seems to be because the machine seems to be doing a lot more disk I/O - it has one of those noisy laptop HDDs and I can hear it crunching away more than ever, even when I’m not really doing anything.

It appears that Thunderbird’s mbox format, render them in the familiar list/web page format.

Here’s the rub - I also do frequent builds on my laptop that typically involve creating vast qualtities of small files (classes, JavaDoc, jars, generated WSDL etc). If GDS insists on indexing each generated file it slows things down considerably. I know I can turn the crawler off for 15 minutes but what I really want is a way for it to switch itself off whenever I’m interacting with my machine.

What I’d really like to know is, is there any way to get the GDS to stop running while I’m actively using my PC? This is really something I’d expect to be there, just like screensaver wait.

In the meantime, I’m going to try adding some directories to the “Don’t search these items” option in the Desktop Search preferences page. Hopefully that will stop it from slowing things down.

Other solutions welcome…