[Ti] Fwd: [Ti] Al-book start-up speed (v Windows XP)

[arjan.bos at icu.nl]

On 5 jan 2004, at 20:35, Dr. Trevor J. Hutley wrote:

> At 21:23 +0100 4/1/04, arjan.bos at icu.nl wrote:
>> Trevor,
>>
>>> I had noticed that when I start up my 15.2" Al Powerbook, that the 
>>> start-up is quite slow.
>>> This seemed to be a result of my recent upgrade to Panther 10.3.2.
>>
>> I really can recommend the sleep mode of your Mac.
>
> Arjan - perhaps you got the wrong impression from my story about 
> start-ups!  They were simply experiments.  In normal use, I always use 
> the sleep mode.  My computer works day and night (Folding at Home when I 
> am not working on the keyboard) and sleeps during my trips to and from 
> the office or on travel/business trips.
>
> I also highly recommend only the sleep mode.  Start-up from sleep is 
> about 1 second, and that always impresses anyone standing  around.
>

Trevor,

It seems that you're right. Via slashdot, I found an article about 
MacOSX, called "What is MacOS X ?"
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/
This talks about how the unix underpinning of the OS works. It starts 
of with Open Firmware and then talks about booting. On the bottom of 
this page: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_boot.html , I found 
that something called BootCache was (partly) broken by "a recent update 
to Panther". This slowed down the boot process up to 100%

 From that page:
<quote>

/System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext is the location of the kernel 
extension implementing the cache while 
Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl within that directory is the 
user-level control utility (it lets you load the playlist, among other 
things). The effectiveness of BootCache can be gauged from the 
following: in a recent update to "Panther", a reference to 
BootCacheControl was broken. BootCache is started (via the control 
utility) in /etc/rc, and a prefetch tag is inserted (unless the system 
is booting in safe mode). /etc/rc looks forBootCacheControl in the 
"kext" directory, as well as in /usr/sbin, and finds it in the former 
(it doesn't exist in the latter). However, another program (possibly 
loginwindow.app) accesses/usr/sbin/BootCacheControl directly, and does 
not find it. For what it's worth, makingBootCacheControl available in 
/usr/sbin, say via a symlink, reduces the boot time (measured from 
clicking on the "Restart" confirmation button to the point where 
absolutely everything has shown up on the system menu) from 135 seconds 
to 60 seconds on one of my machines!

</quote>

So if you're daring enough, you could try to speedup things a bit.
BTW, I'm satisfied with my boot times as they are.

But good of you to spot this increase!

Met vriendelijke groeten,
Arjan

-- Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind -- (Terry 
Pratchett)