Painfully slow OSX startup 1

[sebjenkins]

Hi,

I have a fairly new iBook running OSX 10.3.8 and since the middle of last week, startup has become a problem.

When the machine has booted up to the point that you can see the desktop colour but before the icons load a spinning beanball appears in the top left corner and then sits there for up to 10 minutes before the desktop finishes loading, ie. the desktop items then appear.

Any ideas what maybe causing this lag ? I have tried booting the iBook with and without a live network connection but this made no difference whatsoever. I also looked in the Startup tab in the user account but it is empty apart from iTunes helper.

 

[jmgalvin]

Did you upgrade to 10.3.8 from what came on the machine? If so, this could be causing the slower start. My machine became much slower at boot - at the same point in the process as yours - with the 10.3.8 upgrade. going back to its original OS made it 3 times faster at boot. I uses a powermac g4, 1.25.

Another possible problem is excessive font caches on OSX. This cn casue a number of slowdowns/problems in OSX, yet is not well publicized by Apple.

There are font caches within the various OSX folders. It's a good idea to clear these once in a while. It helps speed up performance and avoid corrupted caches. I once found 15,000 different caches on my machine. It's easiest to just download the shareware program Font Finagler to do this rather than searching all through your machine. You can find it via

http://www.versiontracker.com

 

[vbbr]

Hi,

You can try clearing your virtual memory files and other cached files(icons etc) on your machine using some sharewares like "Onyx" . I have tried it a couple of times and it has helped.

Also try to restore your disk permissions. They might be corrupted making things too slow.

Regards.

 

[sebjenkins]

Just wanted to come back in and update this thread.
I took the advise of jmgalvin and tried Font Finagler and it reduced the startup time from 7 minutes to just 1 min!

Thanks again.

 

[jmgalvin]

Send the Font Finagler guy the modest amont of money for the App. It's about the handiest utility our there for OSX.

 

[ObviousTroll]

A minute is still an awfully long time to boot - you might want to grab Onyx, my Powerbook boots in less than half that time!