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In this tutorial we will have a look at how to speed up your Mac login and how to get rid of unnecessary processes, Kernel Extensions and LaunchAgents.
PLEASE, make a backup before changing anything on your system!
If your system won’t start anymore go to your favourite forum and ask those guys. I, very likely, can’t give you any support!
In OS X all Login Items are executed at once on login. This is very hard to handle for our hard drives.
The idea now is to make an application, which starts applications. By doing this the load gets more balanced over the system. The trick, make a list of apps to execute at login, start each one of them after a delay before going on with the next one.
It’s important to deactive in each application the option “Launch at Login”, because our own app now does this. Some of the applications even re-add themselves without asking – nor having an option. The linked script takes care of this “issue”, too.
In the upper part where it read “removeAppList”, put those apps which re-add themselves. (Really annoying…)
In the lower part “executeAppList”, put those apps which should be executed at login.
Unnecessary processes can be found with Activity Monitor.app in the Utilities folder.
This app displays a list of all running processes and makes it possible to kill them easily.
Some of those apps are “respawning”, some of those are called LaunchAgents.
LaunchAgents are executed by the system automatically. The idea is to have a regularly running service which, let’s say, cleans up several unneeded files. LaunchAgents are being configured by a, so called, Property List. This file(s) can be found in these folders:
~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents
System/Library/LaunchAgents
Kernel Extensions are OS X’s “drivers”.
Most uninstallers simply forget to remove their drivers from the system. This is not very dramatic, because drivers are only loaded when they are needed. But in order to have a “clean” system, you might want to remove them as well.
/Library/Extensions
System/Library/Extensions
If anything goes completely wrong while tweaking. The following things might help.
On startup press ⌘S to get into Single User Mode.
The last lines tell you how to mount the file system. From there on try to put everything back in place by hand.
Hopefully you’ve made a backup before doing anything. Bootup from the Mac OS X installation disk and follow the instructions to restore your system.
