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d_oob · Feb 11, 2005, 12:44 PM

I can't really tell when my Dual 867 MDD started to do this but it now takes almost 4 minutes to start up. It gets to the login screen quick but when it loads up my user, it just hangs forever on the desktop that shows just my desktop picture and the spinning beach ball and nothing else. 4 minutes go by and finally everything pops to life.

Really weird. I was running 10.3.7 when I started noticing this and just recently updated to 10.3.8 and hoped this would fix things but it didn't. The only thing I've done different to my machine that I can think of that might be slowing things down is that I just recently upgraded the internal DVD burner to the DVR108 and also installed a 52x CD burner. My RAM is at 1.25gigs and I have 3 internal ata100 drives with a external firewire drive. Connected to the machine other than keyboard and mouse is a 17" Studio Display. (Which by the way doesn't seem to be having the erratic black patches and distortion since updating to 10.3.8)

Anyone know how I can fix this? Is it a RAM issue? I remember something about turning off RAM testing at the beginning, maybe that's it? Also I've tried the usual Zapping P-Ram and Repair Permissions (from installer disk and harddrive).

Thanks for any help.

auero · Feb 12, 2005, 10:24 AM

I had the same problem. I found out what was the problem. I had too many fonts enabled. Thats why is slowing you down. I'm almost 100% sure. I just went to school with my ipod and took the system fonts from the g5 there with my ipod and loaded them here, restarted and it worked perfect. Of course I backed up all those fonts but now I have the ones I need enabled only. Hope it works!

d_oob · Feb 12, 2005, 12:59 PM

Originally posted by auero:
I had the same problem. I found out what was the problem. I had too many fonts enabled. Thats why is slowing you down. I'm almost 100% sure. I just went to school with my ipod and took the system fonts from the g5 there with my ipod and loaded them here, restarted and it worked perfect. Of course I backed up all those fonts but now I have the ones I need enabled only. Hope it works!

So Disabling some fonts should help speed things up? I dont' have to remove the fonts in order for this happen do I? I can just disable them? I'm gonna try it right now! Thanks.

peace out

Big Mac · Feb 12, 2005, 04:53 PM

For the time being, log into a different user and make sure that the problem affects only your main account.

auero · Feb 12, 2005, 06:48 PM

Originally posted by Big Mac:
For the time being, log into a different user and make sure that the problem affects only your main account.

That doesn't work. I think 10.3.7 changed that because I made a new user and same thing. Like I said, I copied the system fonts from my schools g5, put them on my ipod and then just swapped the folders. ( I think I renamed the fonts folder to fonts2 and then dragged over the fonts folder to the dir and that worked)

How many fonts do you have?

I had about 3000 and it took FOREVER!

Detrius · Feb 12, 2005, 09:23 PM

You can move the Fonts folder out of the way entirely and see if that fixes it. I have also seen configurations on machines that had serious issues when a DNS server was not available.

d_oob · Feb 13, 2005, 08:12 PM

Ok I tried the logging in as a different user. My font book is set-up to only enable fonts for the main user (admin/me) so I created a test new account just for this. I logged in and it was really quick. So it must be the font book being too stuffed with fonts.

So I went back to the Admin account and started Disabling fonts. That took forever as there are over 1000 fonts. With most of the fonts disabled, I logged out of Admin and logged back in. Still took a really long time, same length in fact.

So then I started to take the physical font file out of the fonts folder and just put them in a backup folder. Restarted the machine, instead of logging out logging in to be sure and this time it was a bit quicker. But it still takes pretty long. I would say 95 to 98% of the fonts were removed and it still takes a long time to boot up. So maybe it is another problem with some files being checked at startup?

My Pismo 400MHz G3 boots up faster than my dual 867 G4!!

any clue as to what I can do?

MacGallant · Feb 13, 2005, 09:26 PM

Did you try cleaning the Font Cache? I was having the same problem as you when I updated to OSX 10.3.7 and I found that after using Cocktail (or other similar utilities) to clean the font cache, my system user login was back to it's quick and regular self since.

Detrius · Feb 15, 2005, 08:30 PM

Originally posted by d_oob:
...

My Pismo 400MHz G3 boots up faster than my dual 867 G4!!

any clue as to what I can do?

There is a BIG difference between what you have described and boot times. You are describing login times. Since this is specific to one user and not global, it MUST be somewhere in that user's Library folder. Note that this could be a setting to connect to a server or launch a buggy application that is not user specific.

d_oob · Feb 15, 2005, 11:31 PM

Originally posted by Detrius:
There is a BIG difference between what you have described and boot times. You are describing login times. Since this is specific to one user and not global, it MUST be somewhere in that user's Library folder. Note that this could be a setting to connect to a server or launch a buggy application that is not user specific.

Yeah sorry about the confusion. I probably meant log-in instead of Boot up on my pismo because I only have my one account and that just logs in automatically.

Anyways I've dumped all kinds of cache in the main admin USER not global. And still get really slow startups. Might be a server thing but I don't have this machine connected any kind of internet LAN or WAN or whatever. Although I did have File Sharing turned on between this machine and my pismo so maybe that might be giving it problems. I'm gonna try and see if turning it off will do anything.

Detrius · Feb 18, 2005, 12:25 AM

Since you can log in as a different user just fine, there is something somewhere in the slow user's ~/Library folder that is causing problems. Go through the preferences a handful at a time. Put them in a separate folder, and see if that makes a difference. You can narrow down what is going on this way. There's no way that we will be able to just tell you definitively what is going on here. You have to do the work yourself--we can just help guide you with what kind of manual labor needs to be done.

I don't know if I said this earlier, but this is a software issue and would probably get better results in the OSX forum.

MORT A POTTY · Feb 18, 2005, 03:30 AM

prebinding

fix it w/ Cocktail. I had the same exact problem on my single 867Mhz and this did WONDERS.

Nivag · Feb 18, 2005, 07:52 AM

i had a similar problem and found it was due to my network settings were set to 'Using DHCP' - when i changed it to 'Manually' or 'Using DHCP with manual address' the start-up speed went back to normal.

d_oob · Feb 18, 2005, 01:13 PM

Originally posted by Detrius:
Since you can log in as a different user just fine, there is something somewhere in the slow user's ~/Library folder that is causing problems. Go through the preferences a handful at a time. Put them in a separate folder, and see if that makes a difference. You can narrow down what is going on this way. There's no way that we will be able to just tell you definitively what is going on here. You have to do the work yourself--we can just help guide you with what kind of manual labor needs to be done.

I don't know if I said this earlier, but this is a software issue and would probably get better results in the OSX forum.

Ok I will try what you suggest. It's funny though, that the steps you mention to take is something we use to do in OS 9 back when you had to deal with extensions screwing things up, and you had to use extensions manager to make different sets, and on and on. Not saying that Mac OS is the same but there seems to be a something familiar going on.

Anyway I'll try the preferences thing considering I have a butt load of prefs that don't need to be there anymore from past things also will double check the Network Settings, but I'm pretty sure it isn't that as I don't have this machine connected to any network. Worth a try though.

Thanks again Detrius

Detrius · Feb 21, 2005, 01:08 AM

Originally posted by d_oob:
Ok I will try what you suggest. It's funny though, that the steps you mention to take is something we use to do in OS 9 back when you had to deal with extensions screwing things up, and you had to use extensions manager to make different sets, and on and on. Not saying that Mac OS is the same but there seems to be a something familiar going on.

...

Thanks again Detrius

It's normal troubleshooting procedure to pull stuff out and see if it makes a difference. You are basically doing a manual search for a file that fits a specific attribute. The only attribute you know is that it only affects this one user (and therefore is not network settings, and is not likely prebinding), and it affects login times. I would start with preferences that are related to login, but even if you do a broad search of all files, you will still find it at some point.

It's the same troubleshooting theory as in OS 9 because you are looking for a file that is causing a problem. Otherwise, it's unrelated, as preference files don't conflict with each other. The preference files themselves don't crash.