OS fresh install advice

[RhianB]

I am beginning to experience slower boot times - around 30-40 seconds where the mac would bootup in 20-30 seconds. I have searched & repaired the few permission errors it found & have zapped the PRAM. After researching the problem it was often reccommended to reinstall the OS. Is there a way to do this without losing the data I currently have ie: photos, music, papers etc without slapping them on an external HDD? Yanno - just replace the OS files themselves? Perhaps there is something else I have not looked at that could help speed up my boot time a bit? Here are my system specs.

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac6,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM61.0093.B07
SMC Version: 1.10f3

Such a noob :biggrin:

Thanks for any help.

 

[teapot]

Hi
Possibly the increase of data stored on you iMac is a contributing factor in slowing the boot time. 30 -40 seconds isn't particularly slow. you seemed to have covered all the usual bases.

 

[RhianB]

Yeah I thought about the info aspect ... I mean a number of updates & app installs later, it's not as clean and streamlined as it was when I first got this apple. I use this machine for a home recording studio setup beyond my daily surfing, email, word processing etc. While researching possible causes I ran across an article about recording peripherals & how they can slow down boot times. I run a Presonus Firebox as an analog to digital converter as well as midi interface, so that definitely could be part of this mild slowdown. Yeah yeah, 40-50 seconds isn't that bad either. I watched a boot time video on youtube and the stock intel core duo machine straight out-of-the-box booted in 42 seconds ... considerably faster than the G5 PPC it was up against. I want to ultimately max out the memory on this machine too for improved all around performance. Right now its @ 1gig per the specs in my innitial post. I sure did like those 20 second bootups I was getting when I first got this particular imac though. Zoom zoom. :tongue: