Spotlight taking ages to index after upgrade to Leopard

I did a simple upgrade from Tiger to Leopard and I've noticed a few problems since.

Ever since I've upgraded, the system has been very laggy i.e. lots of beach balls; from switching windows to opening programs. I never experienced this degree of lag in Tiger.

One of the big problems I've had though is with Spotlight. From a restart of Leopard, it seems to be taking forever to index my hard drive (a Macbook 1.8 CD, 2GHz RAM, 60GB HD). At this moment, it's been 20 minutes since I rebooted my Macbook and yet its still saying that it's indexing the drive. The estimated time has been fluctuating between 9 - 15 minutes.

I don't have Time Machine enabled, and Verify Disk and Verify Disk Permissions says that my Mac is OK.

I love Leopard but the small but pervasive problems are making it unusable.

firstly, i have had always had problems when upgrading to leopard form tiger,

if possible try do a clean install, the upgrade seems to jsut give problems, also the 10.5.2 update has sorted out alot o problems i have had before.

as for the indexing, if it is still having a heart attack, jsut force it to reindex the drive.

Might be a corrupted Spotlight preferences file. Try trashing the com.apple.spotlight.plist file (plist = preferences list).

It's inside your log-in user's folder, then inside the Library folder, then inside the Preferences folder. Then restart.

The plist file is only a text file of Spotlight's preferences and will be recreated when you restart. (You can read it by opening it with TextEdit.)

Thanks. I'l try these solutions and report back.

thealluseless said:

firstly, i have had always had problems when upgrading to leopard form tiger,

if possible try do a clean install, the upgrade seems to jsut give problems, also the 10.5.2 update has sorted out alot o problems i have had before.

as for the indexing, if it is still having a heart attack, jsut force it to reindex the drive.

Click to expand...

How do I force it to reindex the drive?

This explains one of the ways, in Tiger, at least.

StevenH said:

Thanks. I'l try these solutions and report back.

Click to expand...

So I tried:

1) reindexing the drive
and
2) deleting the com.apple.spotlight.plist file
and
3) reinstalling leopard with an archive and install


but there's still plenty of occasions after a reboot when it will not finish indexing, like right this moment lol!

Is it possible that it may be a faulty HD?

p.s. My iMac is the machine i'm having spotlight problems with, but I also have a Macbook with is essentially a mirror of my iMac cos it has all the same applications and settings on it. The only difference between the two is just that my iMac has a few more songs and videos on it.