While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.

To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker

(This will disable the spotlight indexing)

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)

If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.

Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!