it just takes a long time to boot up and by long I mean more than 10 minutes, have not been patient enough to wait for it for more than that, I have tried resetting my PRAM the SMC the fsck -fy I have gotten rid of all of my big apps on my computer, I dont really know what else I can do. is there anything else I can do I really want the apple store to be the last resort because I'm a college student and this computer is from 2008...
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Go into System Preferences and look at your login items. Also at the bottom of the System Preferences window, there may be software listed. Make sure the versions are all OS X 10.6 versions. If there are any login items that are no longer relevant for your system, remove them (you may have one there from a program you no longer use, for example).
You can try a safe boot, by holding the shift key down, to see if that is any quicker, although it will take longer than normal because it does some background disk maintenance too.
You've probably already checked to ensure you have 10% or more of your hard drive space free.
You can always run the Apple Hardware Test too, just to be sure there's not an obvious hardware issue.
thanks, I forgot to add the only way I could get onto the computer is when it's on safe mode, I did the hardware test it said nothing was wrong so I deleted alot of things on my computer because that could be the only reason right.
If the only way you can get into your system is through a safe start, that suggests that one or more of your login items is hosing the startup, because a safe start bypasses the login items and doesn't load them.
i have taken down all of my login items and it still wont start up.
Can you download Smart Utility to see if it gives you any insight into any hard drive issues? It will show you the status of the drive based on the SMART sensors. There can be issues that don't trip the SMART status from verified that you see in Disk Utility.
mac is not booting up
