First question, is there any way to disable Spotlight entirely?

I have never found any real use for Spotlight. Instead it is a pain in the butt. When I am typing, every once in a while I hit some key, or combination of keys by mistake and find myself typing in Spotlight and all kinds of stuff taking over my workspace, thus my wish to disable it entirely.

If I want anything found on my MBP, I go to finder>file>find which works great. If I want anything on the web, Google is my friend.

I can see no use either for the tiresome indexing that Spotlight does and hogs memory like crazy. I must be missing something, or am I?

I don't really notice Spotlight indexing at all and I mostly use it as an application launcher (I never could get the hang of Quicksilver's advanced features so I gave the boot). I guess it's more handy for people that like using their keyboard more than navigating through folders or menus.

You can always disable the keyboard shortcut or change it to something else.

Spotlight is the dumbest ever feature that Apple ever saddled any of their operating systems with. The only problem is that shutting it off clobbers the Find command in Finder. I can see no reason why anyone would want it - it is nothing more than big brotherism. Anyone that can keep things organized, and create useful file names will have no problem living without Spotlight - like, even if one uses the default folder structure that Apple already includes in OSX.

It is even more useless and more goofy than the dumb Google box garbage they stiff users with in Safari...

Well since Google is your friend, lets try the obvious and check with Google

I use spotlight all the time as an app launcher. I have 50+ programs on my mac, so it's a lot easier to just hit command+spacebar and type "compressor" to launch a program that I rarely use and don't have a dock icon for.

I dont have any issue with it, dont really use it a whole lot. It has come in handy looking for an obscure job that I didnt file properly. I knew some of the words in the pdf file, so searching for it brought it up very quickly. But if things are properly filed, there is no real need for it.

So that's what I keep hitting by mistake (command+spacebar). Thanks, now I can try to avoid it.

You can use Onyx to disable Spotlight or there are also a series of Terminal commands.

In Tiger this works well except that you have to use a third party app like EasyFind to do file searches. EasyFind seems rather primitive compared to the elegant search engine found in Panther.

Leopard or Snow Leopard may be a bit more tricky. I have no idea how Spotlight and TimeMachine interact but suspect that the latter leans heavily on the former.

FWIW Tiger on older G4s and G3s is a lot zippier with Spotlight disabled. Ditto for Dashboard.

I use it to launch apps that I don't use that often via the Cmd Space bar plus the first few letters of the app name. far faster then using finder.

+1. Even easier than clicking an icon in the dock. And Spotlight seems to finally work well (using Snow Leopard here) and I barely ever notice the indexing. It's also great support for searching within apps that have bad native search capabilities, such as Entourage.