I recently had the opportunity to help InformationWeek writer Mitch Wagner – one of the people I “follow” on Twitter (as “MitchWagner”) – with a slow starting Macintosh system. He mentioned a couple of times on Twitter that it was taking his Mac 8 minutes to start up. Such a lag time can be quite frustrating if you’re having to restart for some reason, like he was.

Here is the thought process and the actions I took, for the enlightenment of you the reader:

The first step is to get a handle on the system in question: what’s there in terms of hardware and software, how big is the storage and memory relative to what is needed, and how much is space left over.

1. First I had him to send his System Profiler file. I saw that he’s got an Intel-based iMac, running OS X Leopard (updated to the latest version – 10.5.6), with enough RAM memory (working memory, as opposed to storage, such as a hard drive) to know that isn’t the cause of the slowdown. And nothing is jumping out at me in terms of the software he’s running, at least from the System Profiler report. But you can’t tell from a System Profiler how much storage (hard drive space) is left over, only the total space. So …

2. Had him “Get Info” on his hard drive volumes and tell me the “Available” and “Used”  space. He had 25.71 Gigabytes available on the (single) volume that he was using as his system, and plenty on his backup (Time Machine) volume. So that wasn’t the problem. I needed to see what was going on inside the system as it was running, while starting up. Time to look at the system log.

3. I sent Mitch this message via Twitter:
“One more : open Console (Utilities folder), and under LOG FILES, pick system.log, go to File, Save a Copy As, and email that.”

Looking at the system.log file, I was able to trace when his last startup was, and how long various processes took. I could see that indeed, his system was taking about 8 minutes to start up. And certain system messages looked suspicious. There are always entries about error conditions in any system log, as the hundreds of UNIX processes run into conditions that they report, but in this case two third party emulators (used to run Windows) - Parallels and VMware – were repeatedly reporting error. There was also at least one USB issue going on. From experience I knew that USB devices (and FireWire too) can hang up or slow down a system. The computer will wait until it’s happy about what a external device or network condition is doing before it releases it’s stranglehold on the system to allow input from the hapless user.

So I emailed him with this advice:

I would try these experiments to see what in particular may be slowing it down
 (if you just re-install you may run into the same issues again):

 Disconnect all USB devices except your mouse
 Turn off or de-install Parallels
 Turn off or de-install VMware

Mitch emails me back later:

I unplugged all USB devices but the keyboard and mouse - that cut boot
time to 2 minutes. Thanks!