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Slow boot up in Leopard

Hey guys,
I have a macbook that i upgraded to Leopard and I have found that the boot up takes about 10-20 seconds longer than it used to with Tiger. When i start up, the screen is grey (with the apple logo), then it fade to a pale blue screen (with no status bar - just blank) and it stays like for about 10-15 seconds, then it cuts to my desktop, and everything is fine. I am only wondering of this prolonged boot up is normal?
Thanks,
-Steve

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5), 2gb ram, 80gb hdd, 2.0ghz intel core duo

Posted on Nov 5, 2007 4:16 PM

Reply
77 replies

Nov 5, 2007 5:09 PM in response to Lear Pilot

Yep,
I can confirm everything, plus the OS in general seems to be slower than 10.4.10.
I recently switched from Win XP in part to avoid being caught in Vista, but I'm not so happy about finding out almost the same problems (slower computer with new OS release) in Macs as well.
Apart from this, all else is absolutely great!
Cheers
Antonio

Nov 7, 2007 7:44 PM in response to slewis88

Add my name to the list...

Leopard takes 45 sec to start up. Tiger was 25 sec. I get the same pale blue screen with the mouse pointer in the upper left corner of the screen. Removing the 20 or so pdf files I was storing on my desktop made a small difference, but this was mostly because the system was getting tied up by updating the icons for Quick Look. I'm wondering if this has something to do with the Windows partition for Paralles. Is anyone else running Parallels? Are there any other hypotheses out there?

Hopefully someone will figure out a solution for this.

Nov 8, 2007 9:59 PM in response to calvinau

I called AppleCare twice today and got a little bit of help. They walked me through deleting several different Caches folders. The pale blue screen is still there, but the start up time is now at 40 seconds (instead of 45).

The first representative said that the startup time for a new machine with Leopard pre-installed is 30 - 60 seconds depending on specs. I'm not sure if that was across all models or specific to the MacBook. The second rep said the NYT article he read clocked Leopard start up at 37 seconds. I can't find the article, so I'm not sure I'd put that much stock in the report.

The first rep also said that Leopard takes longer to boot up than Tiger because it is "more complex," and that it's possible that updates will be released in the next few months to improve boot times.

In the meantime, additional suggestions for improving start times include:
1) Run Disk Repair and Repair Disk Permissions from Leopard DVD
2) Back up files and then try Erase and Install



I haven't tried either of these yet, but hopefully the first will make a difference. I'm a little wary of deleting all my files to save 10 seconds per start up.

Nov 9, 2007 3:06 PM in response to slewis88

Well, maybe the answer that "it is more complex" so it boots slower is the more precise, but, correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't it the opposite with previous upgrades?
I mean, as far as I know, every release of OSX is faster than the previous, although being more complex.
Except Leopard, that is...
But, I must admit, I'm a Mac user since july, so I'm not exactly an expert, although I did some research before switching from Windows, and one of the best features of the whole Mac thing was exactly what I just mentioned.
Now, I don't want to criticise Apple's policies, nor rant uselessly, but I hope some upgrade to correct this "malfunction" and several other minor glitches is coming fast.
For the time being, I'm doing my part with reporting every little problem to Apple with the automatic feature in OSX.
I want this new otherwise wonderful OS to work!

Cheers all

Nov 9, 2007 3:52 PM in response to slewis88

Same symptoms here. Roughly 30 seconds longer to boot than tiger, and 45 seconds longer to shut down than tiger. Did everyone in this forum do just the upgrade to Leopard as I did?

I'm thinking that there is some incompatible junk that is slowing it down and that an erase and install would help things out. It seems to me that people who did the erase and install method are having less speed issues. Thoughts?

Nov 11, 2007 11:15 AM in response to Slybiker88

I'm in the same boot as most of you guys. I just switched to Mac from Windows last month (Oct), and Tiger was lightning fast compared to my P4 Toshiba.

But with Leopard, my boot and shut down times more than doubled. As one fellow said up above, all my software is great, speedy and smooth with my 3GB of RAM, but my boot time is awful (though, still MUCH faster than any version of XP I have owned).

It'd be nice to get an updated to aid in this. But my productivity on this machine compared to my last machine FAR outweighs my interest in raising **** about boot times. No matter how I look at it, I'm in a much better position than I was 2 months ago.

Nov 11, 2007 5:41 PM in response to slewis88

I was having the same problem after I upgraded my 17" MacBook Pro. It would take about 20 seconds to start up tiger but over two min in leopard. I tried checking the startup disk selected, verified and repaired the os x partition with the disk utilty on the leopard install disk and that did not work. I deleted the Vista partition and did a full erase and install. The first couple of start ups saw marginal increases in speed but after about five or so I got from the apple logo and chime to a fully functional desktop in about 30 seconds. It was a pain but worth it. I wonder was wondering if all of you have a bootcamp partition? Anyways it fixed the problem and I have since reinstalled Vista with no problems.

Slow boot up in Leopard

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