Why is my MBP booting slower than my older iMac?

I just booted in a minute now, I don’t know why. Still a bit slow, but better than 1:43.4… Does anyone have some tips for speeding this thing up?

You do web development, right? Have you installed anything like the MySQL server?

Here is a thread with some suggestions for this problem. You aren’t the only one, it appears :>)

@richardhenry: No I haven’t
@crisw: Thanks, I’ll look into that. :)

@crisw: I tried the Open Firmware reset thingy but it turns out my MBP hasn’t got Open Firmware anymore, it’s EFI now. For the rest I tried some things but they didn’t really work. What I’m going to do now is try Onyx. A lot of users use this program, so maybe it helps. :)

@crisw
Lurve for you!
Just for the heck of it I tried the tip mentioned in your link (duplicate fonts in FontBook app), MAN my 9 Yr old Pismo with 1 gig ram and running 10.4.11, started up in 37 seconds flat!!! Twice as fast as it did before! GREAT tip/find!

Haha, what a conincidence! :D But, when your low-end machine boots up in 37 secs, my MBP can do better right? Right now it’s still 1 min. (still have to try Onyx though)

Oh my god, it just freezed. Out of nowhere, no kernel panic, no nothing. Can still move the mouse, but it has freezed… Stupid thing.

Oh wait, it’s normal when it does that during verifying the startup volume.. Sorry! :)

@Bagardbilla

Yeah, it’s a new tip for me as well, and i’m going to try it on some slow old machines at work.

A Pismo, eh? Even at my work that would be kind of a dinosaur…although we just retired our last PowerMac 5400 recently! We do have a few Wall Streets around somewhere in the back room :>)

@klaas4

Did you try the Font Book tip?

I did, didn’t work. Onyx doesn’t do squat too, back at 1.47.4….

And now it’s back to a minute. It seems very random… I’m going to try more Onyx.

Deleted all caches, booted very slow (which is normal of course) but launch time of the Finder was improved. Restarting a couple more times..

@crisw I can’t believe the difference that getting rid of dupes in Fontbook made! How very strange! Well done for finding that.

I did a clean install and now it flies again. Strange..

Mine is slow too, sigh. I am going to buy the first Snow Leopard model that comes out – this Powerbook G4 Ti has done me well for 9 years.

Hmm, I just tried booting into verbose mode, and it boots about 15 secs faster sometimes. wtf..

Sleep it.

I put my Macs to sleep instead of shutting them down. Then do a reboot about once a week. It’s better than waiting for the dern thing to boot every time. Plus it’s energy-wise.

I also sleep it, but I don’t when I need to take it to somewhere. And btw, when I want a (re)boot, I want it fast. Macs are also advertised with it’s boot times, you know. I bought the machine for speed, right?

You know, I found it. It started booting slow again, and I found the ffing solution! Reinstall the latest Mac OS X Combo Update. It doesn’t hang at the login screen anymore and Finder flies! Hope this also helps someone!

Thanks for al the replies.

[solved]

Failed updates can be a real bane. I had someone bring me their MacBook for similar reasons. It wasn’t until the person mentioned that something happened during their update to knock them off their home network that I figured that one out.

I’m not a fan of the update process. I would rather have the thing downloaded and let the user run it. That way if it fails, you can just run it again and not have to go to the trouble of re-doing it by downloading it from the internet (again) then applying it (again).