My Mac OSX 10.6.8 is very slow at start up

[Raana]

Me and my wife happened to buy two Intel iMac for each of us. Both of which bears Mac OSX 10.6.8 as its OS. They have been performing well ever since we bought it. However, my wife’s system have started behaving better than mine these days and she says it is only because of my carelessness. Whatever may be the reason, the performance have started showing difference. There are many areas of difference, but the most basic one is the start up area. When my PC takes more than 80 seconds to even show to the Apple icon and another 30 seconds to load the wall paper to the system, her iMac takes lesser than 10-15 seconds for entire boot up. I am quite concerned about this behavior of my PC. When everything is the same between both the systems, what could possibly be the issue all about?

Anyways, chucking the roots and cause of the issue, I am more interested in the solution and fix to this. I want to completely get rid of this and make the start up faster.

[Jezriah]

Ok! As your wife said, this might be because of your carelessness…. Na… just kidding. Your carelessness has nothing to do with this. The problem might be something else. Your configuration and everything gets matched. Totally agreed, but there is a difference between usage, the programs that you use has to differ from what your wife use. Also, maybe you use it for more hours than your wife does. All these features do matter.

Anyways, I won’t to be able guess what the issue is all about, so you will have to please post back with your current configuration. And let me know if you have installed any new thing into it

[Raana]

Oh definitely! And by the way, I am going to make my spouse read this post of yours. Anyways, talking about the configuration, it would be as follows:
My system basically has an external hard disk of the size 1 TB, it also have a couple of USB Powered DVD Writers. I have connected all of them since last few months only. I don’t remember if the issue commenced before or after that. Also, one thing to be noticed is that my internal optical drive stopped working a few days ago. Also, another thing worth noticing is that there are 6 errors reported with the Disk Utility records and the button which states ‘Repair Permission’ refuses to repair it.

[Jezriah]

Ok! The issue might or might not be related to the problems and the changes you mentioned. But I would ask you to try the following things first:

- Start with clearing the Parameter Random Access Memory (PRAM) this should be enough
- If this doesn’t help, there is a more tedious test that you need to perform right now:

o Ok! Start with removing all the USB connections except the mouse and keyboard.
o Then try rebooting and see if there is an improvement, if you find an improvement, connect each devices back one by one.
o While doing this, keep rebooting every time you connect a new device.
o Notice any delay in the start up if any. If you encounter one, simply conclude that there is an issue with the device

The second option as I mentioned is a very tedious, long and extremely boring procedure. But there is no other go to find out where the problem actually lies. It might take almost a hour but it will compensate the time that you will spend waiting for reboot. If you are lucky enough, you can even end up finding the correct device at the very first try in 15 minutes.

[jaykant]

The very first thing to do when in such a situation is booting your Mac in Safe Mode then simply restarting normally is one of the most overlooked, most effective procedures for solving a variety of issues after an incremental Mac OS X update, including performance problems. The reason for its efficacy: booting in Safe Mode forces a disk directory check, clears potentially problematic cache files and performs other routines, detailed here.
To boot in Safe Mode, hold the Shift key while your Mac is starting up. After booting in Safe Mode, simply restart normally (without holding the Shift key) and check for persistence of the issue.

Second thing to try: reinstall the combo updater
Download the Mac OS X 10.6.4 combo updater, which weighs in at a hefty 887MB. Quit all open applications and run the installer.

Third thing to try: remove startup and login items
Login and/or startup items can exhibit compatibility issues with new Mac OS X releases, and therefore slowdown startup times. Your best be is to remove all of these types of items that come from third parties, then add them back individually or in groups to identify the problematic ones

Login Items. Open System Preferences from Apple menu (upper-left corner of the screen) then click “Accounts.” Choose your current account from the left pane, then click the “Login Items” tab in the right pane. Deselect all items except those installed by Apple, such as “iTunes Helper” (you may need to click the lock box in the lower left of the screen to make changes

Save the changes, then restart and check for performance issues.

Startup Items. Look in root level of your startup drive (e.g. Macintosh HD). Navigate to Library/StartupItems. Remove all items to a safe location. Restart and check to see if you still have slow startup.
You can also use Activity Monitor to check for processes that might be causing the slowdown.

• Launch Activity Monitor (access Spotlight in the upper-right corner of the screen, and beging to type “Activity Monitor”)
• In the top menubar, switch from “My Processes” to “All Processess” using the drop-down menu
• Look for any third-party processes that might be running the background and slowing down startup .