What follows here are ways to speed up boot times in 10.3.2. They are not without problems, so you must use at your own risk. There are two threads on the Apple Discussion boards that are worth taking a look at to solve the slow boot problem in 10.3.2.
Possible Slow 10.3.2 Boot Time Fix Posted, Discussed
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Why would anyone want to take the chance that the next update will cause you to spend extra time trying to figure out what to do in order to save a few seconds during boot time?
I do not believe that 30 seconds or more out of my life each day will waste more time than other non-essential things that I do. Besides, I only boot when required by an update, etc.
I will just wait for the next update and not worry about boot time.
Why would anyone Shutdown or Reboot Mac OS X unless an update required you to? Ok, there are, for 99% of us, VERY unusual times when our Macs lock up. But this is very rare and uncommon. This is not Windows that you have to reboot every time you sneeze.
I don’t think everyone just keep their machines running all day long, but some people turn on whenever they feel they need to use computers, otherwise turn’em off. Not everyone is like some of you people, and they for sure wish their machines to boot up faster. Actually I am like some of you people (keep the machine running unless reboot is required) though.
Lets spend time figuring out how to reboot faster so we don’t have to spend as much time rebooting…Now thats mac logic! (And I’ve got one, so I can say that
)
You had me for a minute there. Then I realized you were kidding.
Seriously though. I’m really impressed with how quickly Macs can go in/out of “sleep” mode that it’s no longer neccessary to shutdown anymore. WinXP has gotten better at what they call “hibernation” but it’s still not instantaneous, which IS the case with Macs.
“some people turn on whenever they feel they need to use computers, otherwise turn’em off”
All the Mac users I know keep their computers on all the time. Sleep mode actually works, and is actually silent.
Please don’t use Windows (XP). You would eat your words, and with that much ignorance on them, they wouldn’t taste good.
Keep it serious if you want to be taken seriously.
Gein
it save energy and you get a fast time to usability.
I boot or reboot my iBook very occasionally. Does anyone reboot mac every day??
I have never reboot my PowerBook, I have shut it down when I am taking it to the office with me or put in sleep mode when I am heading off to dinner.
I never reboot my PB either.. When I’m done, I just close it.. IMHO its one of the best things about a mac.
Ok, there are, for 99% of us, VERY unusual times when our Macs lock up
You just made that number up.
When you just close the lid of the PB does it still use the battery power? I too find it to be the Mac Laptops best feature.
I use my iBook in bed often and place it on my bedstand, but if I simply sleep it the pulsating LED on the front disturbs me when I’m trying to sleep. It’s easier to shut the iBook off than it is to get out of bed to move it to a place where the LED won’t disturb me.
I use my iBook in bed often and place it on my bedstand, but if I simply sleep it the pulsating LED on the front disturbs me when I’m trying to sleep. It’s easier to shut the iBook off than it is to get out of bed to move it to a place where the LED won’t disturb me.
Try closing your eyes. It helps you sleep better
tup has got some issues.. boi!
Why is it that computers need to go through this long booting process… in particular when it’s the same over and over. It should be a relic of the past by now. Anything else I can turn is on is on in a few seconds. TV, radio, camera, toaster. There should be something in the computer that detects whether a full boot is really necessary. Change of software, hardware or a crash. And otherwise just be on in a few seconds.
It all depends on your bus speeds etc. My Inspiron 8200 laptop takes a good 10-15 seconds to enter hibernation while it’s instantaneous on my custom AMD box (same a standby).
Actually, sleep/hibernation/suspend has never worked on any of my laptops. Probably because Compaq laptops are not very well supported under Linux.
I re-boot my Mac every day. It’s just a habit I got into years ago on a my Mac classic and I still do it, even with OS X on a G3 B&W. I know I don’t have to, I just still do…
I didn’t know there was a booting problem! If you ask me how much time does my machine take to boot, I will answer “Not long enough to become impatient”. I only reboot when required.
@ jason Walsh: I hope you don’t forget to run the maintenance scripts (generally scheduled between 3 and 5 AM).
I never reboot my PB unless I need to for updates or software installs. Close the lid and it goes to sleep. Open the lid and its instant on. Why turn it off? Powering any PC or laptop on and off actually degrades the lifespan of the mainboard and is completely unecesary on a Mac.
its true, almost everyone i speak to compares the boot times as if its a measure of breed!
My Shuttle XPC running win2k has only every crashed 2 * in 8 months and both of those were due to a DVD not burning correctly. Shutdown and restart thats up to me sometimes its up and running for months. Don’y know windows, since 2K its been rock stable.
I’ve recently got an iBook G4 and that does a shutdown and restart everyday ! Bye the way, I’ve also noticed the chnage since 10.3.2. I was really happy with the iBook (still am) esp the startup – faster than even the IBM T40’s that we use at work, but after the update it seems to take forever to startup. Before it was turn on, and within 10 secs or so you had the desktop.
I have a PowerMac G4 AGP and I just put it to sleep and it wakes instantly. It took me about two months after switching to Mac to get used to not turning the Mac off. On my Wintel PCs I wanted to turn them of, since I was so used to memory leakages, and scared of intruders, it became a habit to turn off my PC when I wasn’t using it.
On my Mac, the longer it is on the more efficient and faster it becomes. When I am working late at night, I notice the indexing services coming on, the various clean up jobs. The cache also becomes more efficient as it contains my most often used code. What a stark contrast with my Windows PCs that become less efficient and slower the longer I kept them on. Win XP was a lot better, but it still required a reboot every once and a while to clean things up, not to mention registry cleaning, etc.
My main computer at work used to take 45 minutes to boot; with the most resent OS upgrade, the boot time is down to only about 30 minutes.
I’ve used several Dell computers that had boot times of around 15 minutes (4-way 450Mhz PII with 200Gb of disk space in a 4 disk RAID5 configuration and Windows NT 4.0).
For those of you who wonder why booting takes so long…
1) The Firmware does a hardware self test: Memory, CPU, Busses, Timers, IO Controllers, …
2) The OS does a self test.
3) Drivers are loaded; they also normally do a hardware test. Note: most OS’s will attempt to load every driver aviable and just let the driver unload itself if the required hardware isn’t aviable.
4) The network needs to be initalized, configured, and any defaults set.
5) Network connections will need to be reconnected.
6) All additional servers will need to be started based on what you use: (my Mac) CUPS, Apache, FTP, Samba, & OpenBase.
Note, my main computer at work is:
6-way 1.2GHZ POWER4 processors (we only have 3 turned on)
12GB RAM
1318GB diskspace (1 storage unit divided across 90 HDs)
3 1Gb Ethernet controlls
1 DVD ROM drive
1 8GB tape drive
Servers running:
3 HTTP Servers
1 Websphere Server
1 Showcase Server (to support a query reporting system)
Windows File Server (to support those stupid MSFT systems)
Windows Print Server (dido)
FTP Server (can’t live with out this)
Telnet Server
SQL DB2 Server (to support OLE-DB & ODBC connections)
Terminal Server (to support network attached terminals)
REXEC Server (to support remote command execuation)
Normal Usage:
about 100 printers
about 200 users
about 10 full time ODBC connections
about 50 time clocks (the system handles our payroll)
It’s early in the morning still, but currently we have about 2000 jobs running on the box. I’ve seen it go upto about 2500 when things get busy.
Seriously though. I’m really impressed with how quickly Macs can go in/out of “sleep” mode that it’s no longer neccessary to shutdown anymore. WinXP has gotten better at what they call “hibernation” but it’s still not instantaneous, which IS the case with Macs.
It is possible to go on standby on Windows XP, where it shuts down unneeded components (and scales back processor speed on most laptops). Hibernation on the other hand is a totally different baby altogether. It is physically shutting down the machine, but instead of traditionally shutting down and booting Windows, the memory image is reloaded from the hard disk into the memory. Thus everything seems to be the same before hibernation.
Mac OS X, IIRC, has hibernation too. Never tried it though.
Oh, as for coming back from sleep mode – it is pretty fast. Unless you have very very little memory, it should be instantanous, except of course, as soon as the monitor becomes active again. My HP laptop – which isn’t the best of bread, comes out from standby almost as fast as an iBook – its LCD screen just starts a little slower.
45 minutes? How old is that computer?
My boot times, since I upgraded to Panther, seem to be much faster than Jaguar.
But since I rarely reboot my Macs, and never shut them down, I guess I don’t experience the boot-up time very often.
Some of us (me and I’m sure I’m not the only one) can’t get their computer to sleep without locking up around 40% of the time when you try to wake it up. I would sleep it when not used except for this problem.
The “fix” seems to have messed up the symbolic links in /Network and /automount. Still investigating…
@ jason Walsh: I hope you don’t forget to run the maintenance scripts (generally scheduled between 3 and 5 AM).
You know something, I did know that but had completely forgotten. Thanks for reminding me. I feel like such an idiot…
Rajan R: 45 minutes? How old is that computer?
If you notice he describes a 6-WAY IBM POWER4 server with 1.3 terabytes of storage on some 90 disks and a bunch of services that start at boot.
It is a fairly new machine if it has 1.2 Ghz power4 cpus. A machine that size would need to do extensive POST and initializations during boot. Imagine getting a 90 disk storage unit to finish its power on self test and initialization.
Some machines that have 500 GB of RAM need to do a full memory test on boot and that alone can take about 30 minutes. POST software has to go through and do write and read tests to every byte or bit on the DIMMS.
Not every one uses a PC!!!! Some actually use Big machines that have a few hundred users on them at any given time. Those machines however should never go down unscheduled without a redundant back up system.
In this case I think it is more of a configuration issue than the machines age.
It’s amazing – all these comments by people who never reboot when this discussion is for people who do reboot their Macs.
I *like* to shut down when I’m finished with my Mac. It saves electricity (natural resources) and saves my Mac from getting fried in the event of a power outage/spike (I’ve seen this happen, a major inconvenience).
I applied the fix (copying a link to /usr/sbin) and it has brought boot times back to the way it was after installing 10.3.0. The only adverse effect was that my Mac stop starting up the 2nd and 4th times it was rebooted (the fix asks you to reboot twice to rebuild the cache.)