Disable Spotlight indexing, save battery life I am using my laptop with very limited battery availability. I need to save as much battery as possible.


I would like to disable Spotlight indexing, how do I do that?
What else should I disable, even temporarily, to truly maximise savings? Services? Unix daemons? Is there a list?


Thanks.

PS I have already:


dimmed keyboard backlight (on a MacBook Pro)
switched off WiFi (apart from this post)
dimmed screen backlight
disabled discrete graphics
closed non-vital apps
Well, the immediate way is:

sudo mdutil -i off /


from the command line (you will have to enter your admin password) to stop indexing immediately.

You might also want to add the following step:

sudo vim /etc/hostconfig


(you might want to use a different editor than vim, YMMV) 

Then, navigate to the entry

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-


and change it to 

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-


SAVE the changes the exit the file.  BTW, have a look at iFixit on how to change the battery, it seems you could have much better use of the laptop that way.