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Mac Tip: Why Does Lion Indexing After Install Slow Down My System

Mac Tip: Why Does Lion Indexing After Install Slow Down My System

This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.


How To: Why Does Lion Indexing After Install Slow Down My System

If you haven’t yet updated to Lion then this tip will hopefully help you achieve a better user experience.

Lion, as Snow Leopard did before, incorporates a very powerful search function called Spotlight. Spotlight can visibly be seen the the top right hand corner of your display as shown below:

In order for Spotlight to present results from search quires as quickly as it does it requires indexing. Hence, due to plenty of changes within the operating system when you upgrade to Lion your system will need to re-index many files that have changed along with new ones that have been added.

As a result you may notice that the performance of Lion will not be as fast as that of Snow Leopard whilst this process is taking place.

The good news is however after and hour or two the process should be complete therefore allowing you to get to work at full speed.

When Spotlight is indexing your hard drive, you will notice if you look at the Spotlight magnifying glass logo in the top right hand corner of your display that a small dot in the middle will appear and start to fluctuate therefore indicating that indexing is taking place.

Once the indexing is complete this will go away and you will be presented with simply the magnifying glass logo as shown in the above picture and at that time you will notice a significant performance increase.

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