[frankthetank966]

Hey ya'll, I am still having some little issues switching from my Windows to Mac and I would like to get it resolved before school starts up again. Anyways I would say my Windows skills were very polished but my Mac skills are fairly amateur at the moment. I'll be honest I can do a bit more on a Mac than most people but I would like to figure out some things I knew how to do on Windows.

Anyways, in Windows if you would go to run>MSCONFIG you can control or try to control which applications startup. How do you change this on you Mac OS X computer?

[Macola]

System Preferences : Accounts : Login Items?

[frankthetank966]

I dont think thats quit what I am looking for. Unless there aren't that many items that startup. As of now it has these items listed in the box: iTunes Helper, Microsoft AU Daemon, SpeechSynthesisServer and LCCDaemon. The only one that has a check box it LCCDaemon. But the box says "Hide." What exactly does that mean? And which of these do I actually need to startup?

[peeb]

You don't need to mess with it the same way you did Windows - I have a hunch you got this machine second hand though? LCCDaemon is a Logitech thing that detects keyboards and mice iirc, it's not doing any harm, but if you never think you will need to use Logitech stuff, I guess you could remove it and shave a fraction of a milisecond from your boot time. Your computer will make sure that the ones you need are booted. iTunes helper does something to do with iPod recognition, Microsoft AU is to do with office 2004, and I don't know about Speech - other than it looks like it's to do with the speech synthesis...
In general, you will find much less need to mess with these kinds of things on the Mac than Windows.

[frankthetank966]

Awesome!!! Anyways I did not get this machine second hand LOL. But its cool, I have a wireless MX Logitech Mouse.

[Art Vandelay]

And the hide checkbox indicates if you want to have the app launch hidden or not. Since the apps you listed are background apps that are always hidden anyways, it doesn't make a difference.

[ginoledesma]

There are two places where apps and other services lodge themselves in for auto-start:
1. The Login Items in the Account preferences section. This is user account-specific.
2. The StartupItems directories found in /Library/StartupItems (global to all users) and /System/Library/StartupItems (system-wide services).

[Thinine]

There's also /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons (and their /System and ~/ counterparts) that control the launching of various daemons and things through launchd.

[cgc]

If you click on the Apple Menu and select "About This Mac" you'll see a window describing your Mac. From that window select "More Info..." where another window will open. Scroll down the Contents column and you'll see a section labelled "Software" with a disclosure triangle next to it, click on the triangle and you'll see another option called "Startup Items." If you click on something it will tell a little about it, but if you find something you need to delete it has the location. I'd Google anything unknown prior to deleting it (and make a backup) just to be on the safe side.

[mduell]

launchd also runs a lot of things on startup, but I'm not sure where it's configuration file lies.

[Ganesha]

launchd agents can live in:

~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

All except the last one are empty on a new install.

To see which ones are currently 'active': sudo launchctl list

[frdmfghtr]

I've wondered about startup items for some time as well...

In my list of startup items, most of them I assume to be necessary. Two that I wonder about though are the Apache web server and Remote Desktop Agent. I don't run a web server nor do I use Apple Remote Desktop. I don't see them in the Activity Monitor so I don't think they are running; if that is the case, why have them in the startup list at all?

[Mithras]

The startup might be there, but if you have the service turned off all it does is check the setting, see it shouldn't launch, and move on.

[frankthetank966]

Awesome RESPONSES ya'll!!!

Anyways do these need to startup:

HPIO
HP Trap Monitor
Metdata
RemoteDesktopAgent
SNMP