"Optimizing Your Mac -Performance and battery life may be impacted until completed." I have already finished the installation. What is left to complete?

Then, let it finish.

What to finish? It just had a 'close' button!

Same problem here. That "Optimizing Your Mac" dialog has been on my screen now for more than 12 hours. I have rebooted twice; it reappears. Can't imagine what it's doing or how to solve this. Not impressed with Mavericks so far.

And, what happens after you close it and restart?

No change after restart. I then reinstalled the OS, and that solved the problem.

Thanks for the feedback. Good computing.

I've got the SAME EXACT THING. Do I really have to reinstall? Again?

If so what is the procedure so I don't lose my files?

I've got a time machine from right before the mavericks install... but can that be restored to mavericks? On the other hand I don't want to make a new backup with the messed up OS and then use that...

Boot into recovey mode and follow the instructions to install the OS. Reinstallation leaves your data alone.

I will add my voice here to say that there isn't anything about this message that particularly implies that this is a description of a current activity. It reads more like "Optimizing your Mac is important -- go do it".

Perhaps ***Currently*** optimizing your Mac would be better.

This is confusing especially as I got this with a whole host of calendar and to-do notification popups, that clearly use the same notification mechanism, and all have an imperative association. Mixing status updates with imperative directives is not a particulary clear piece of UI.

It's quite clearly an information message, from the way it is phrased. An instruction for you to do something would use the imperative - it would say something like "Optimize your Mac", or maybe ask a question, "Have you thought about optimizing your Mac?" :-)

...but, of course, I wish it would hurry up and finish :-)

Same problem here.

Slow Mac and the optimizing message.

Optimising to me means defragging but some people are saying that its Spotlight re-indexing your Mac.

I've checked in Spotlight but there's no notification or progress bar visible.

There must be some reference to this process on Apple's site but good luck in finding it.

Additionally I'd like to say that after installing Mavericks 10.9.4 I've found learning all the new features has been frustrating due to a lack of information, I've really had to mine it out of the OS thru help screens etc.

What I'd really like is a series of videos or tutorial docs that I could use to run through all the new features, has anyone seen anything like this?

Apple's site does enthusiastically list new features but doesn't tell you how to use them.

Try launching Activity Monitor while the 'Optimizing your Mac' message is displaying - on my Mac, the 'repair_packages' process was using up a lot of CPU. repair_packages disappeared once the Optimizing your Mac message disappeared.

drowningindata wrote:

What I'd really like is a series of videos or tutorial docs that I could use to run through all the new features, has anyone seen anything like this?

Bit late perhaps, but for future reference: https://www.apple.com/support/mac/

If you're looking to optimize your Mac, the best way would be with http://www.detoxmymac.org - you'll extend your battery life, clear up around 2.5GB, and make your Mac lightning fast again. It's the only thing that really worked for me 🙂