Long Mac OS X Boot Times Resolved

Thanks to a couple of members of Apple's Discussion Board, I was able to solve the problem of my long boot times, sometimes around 7 minutes each!

First, I learned that the flashing folder/question mark button meant the system was looking for a "network start-up" as opposed to a "disk start-up."

Since my iBook is used, it had another wireless and wired network associated with it, in addition to my own networks.

So, the first solution: "Check you have the correct Startup Disk selected in System Preferences > Startup Disk."

My boot time after doing that was cut from 5 minutes - 7 minutes before to just over 2 minutes, after.

Second step was to do a "safe-boot" in order to check the hard disk. This boot takes longer than a normal boot, by default, as it is checking the disk and apparently will correct any disk errors before booting into the GUI.

After doing this, my boot time was just over 1 minute!

I asked for any additional tweaks. One response was to boost the RAM from 256MB and max it to 640MB. I've considered this and probably will if I can come across a very good deal since this machine is already old and I don't want to drop much money into it. Instead a Mac Mini would be nice ;-).

One last suggestion, which I haven't had time to test, is to System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items, to see what I have loading at startup? Similar to Windows, there could be some junk in there that can be removed and likely increase the speed somewhat.

Finally, one respondent pointed out the obvious in that 600MHz won't deliver the speed we're accustomed to on the faster systems out today. That's certainly true. I'm just trying to learn Mac OS X and then when Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" comes out with faster hardware, I'll probably drop the money to buy a new computer.

mac os x