1596. Speeding up Mac Booting?

My Mac takes what feels like forever to boot up—it’s certainly slower than it used to be. Is there anything I can do to speed up this process, and let me get to work quicker?

One suggestion would be to simply not reboot your Mac often, because it rarely needs to be rebooted—certainly, there’s no need to shut down every night. On the other hand, that doesn’t answer your question.

There are several steps you can take to speed up the booting process of a Mac. First, and most helpful, would be to replace your hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Doing so can make a huge difference not only in the boot speed, but in the performance of your computer, in general. The good news is that SSD prices are dropping rapidly (although they’re still more expensive than standard, spinning hard drives); the bad news is that if you have a relatively “modern” Mac, it already includes an SSD. In addition, modern Mac laptops aren’t configured to be user-serviceable, and you won’t be able to replace the hard drive yourself. One easy way to check is turn the laptop over and look for screws on the bottom. If you find screws, you can replace the hard drive. If you don’t see screws, you have a modern laptop and already have an SSD installed.

If you do already have an SSD, or if you want to consider alternatives, consider the excellent guide to accelerating Mac startup, here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/make-mac-start-faster/. In addition to suggesting that you replace your spinning hard drive with an SSD, the article makes other suggestions, such as removing extra programs that start at boot time from your user account. To do that, load System Preferences, select Users & Groups, select your own user name from the list of users, select Login Items, and then delete items that you don’t need startup with your computer. This, too, can save measurable startup time.

For the best “bang for your buck,” replace a spinning hard drive with an SSD. For more tips on speeding up your Mac’s startup, check out the full article: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/make-mac-start-faster/.