Spotlight Issues

I'm not sure what upgrade did it but at one point, Spotlight became totally unusable for me. I think it was a major update that enabled web-searches as part of Spotlight.

Now I've been using Spotlight for years to launch applications. There's nothing easier when you're typing along and need to launch an application than hitting 'command - space' and continuing to work, or to do a quick bit of math, or a to take a quick note... the possibilities are endless (okay, not endless but it's a lot!). At some point, that quick little shortcut became a long, long pause.

Now recently I decided to tackle this issue as it became just too frustrating. I messed with the Spotlight preferences, I re-indexed, I searched, but eventually gave up until I launched activity monitor to see what was going on behind the scenes. I saw that 'suggestd' was pegging the CPU during that time. A quick search brought up this link which seems to have solved the problem.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7264893?start=0&tstart=0

Basically you need to delete the ~/Library/Suggestions folder and relogin. I'm sure there is some kind of cache in there that was corrupted somewhere along the way. Anyway, this was a great find for me and I'm happily back to using Spotlight on a regular basis.

How to solve the 10 most common tech support problems yourself

Here are some great tips.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047667/how-to-solve-the-10-most-common-tech-support-problems-yourself.html

OS X Boot Key Combinations

I'm not sure where I got this but here it is for my reference.

Boot key combinations:

Everybody knows about some of these boot key combinations, but some of the more obscure combinations have been long forgotten (like how many of us have a Quadra AV and use a TV as a monitor!) – Check these out, you may need one of them someday!

C : Forces most Macs to boot from the CD-Rom drive instead of the internal hard drive. Only works with Apple ROM drives and with bootable CD discs.
D : Forces the first internal hard drive to be the startup disk.
N : Netboot (New World ROM machines only) – Looks for BOOTP or TFTP Server on the network to boot from.
R : Forces PowerBooks to reset their screen to default size (helpful if you’ve been hooked up to an external montior or projector!)
T : Target Disk Mode (FireWire) – Puts machines with built-in FireWire into target Disk mode so a system attached with a FireWire cable will have that device show up as a hard drive on their system. Very useful for PowerBooks!
Mouse Button Held Down : Ejects any mounted removable media.
Shift : Disables all extensions (Mac OS 7-9), or disables Login items when using Mac OS X 10.1.3 or later. Also works when booting Classic mode up just like you were using the OS natively.
Option : When using an Open Firmware "New World ROM" capable system, the System Picker will appear and query all mounted devices for bootable systems, returning a list of drives & what OS they have on them. On "Old World" systems the machine will simply boot into it’s default OS without any Finder windows open.
Space bar : Brings up Apple’s Extension Manager (or Casady & Greene’s Conflict Catcher, if installed) up at startup to allow you to modify your extension set.


Command-V : Boots Mac OS X into "Verbose Mode", reporting every console message generated during startup. Really shows what’s going on behind the scenes with your machine on startup!


Command-S : Boots Mac OS X into "Single User Mode" – helpful to fix problems with Mac OS X, if necessary.


Command-Option : Rebuilds the Desktop (Mac OS 7-9).


Command-Option-P-R : Erases PRAM if held down immediately after startup tone. Your machine will chime when it’s erased the PRAM, most people will hold this combination for a total of 3 chimes to really flush the PRAM out.


Command-Option-N-V : Erases NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM). Used with later Power Macintosh systems mostly.


Command-Option-O-F : Boots the machine into Open Firmware (New World ROM systems only).


Command-Option-Shift-Delete : Forces your Mac to startup from its internal CD-ROM drive or an external hard drive. Very helpful if you have a 3rd party CD-ROM drive that is not an Apple ROM device.


Command-Option-Shift-Delete-#(where #= a SCSI DEVICE ID) : Boot from a specific SCSI device, if you have your 3rd party CD-ROM drive set to SCSI ID 3, you would press "3" as the # in the combination.