MacBook Air has suddenly become very slow at booting and shutdown

Question

I have a Late 2010 MacBook Air, and it has a 256 GB SSD, 2.13 GHz processor, and 4 GB RAM. It has been lightning fast ever since I bought it and I upgraded to OS X Lion and it was super fast. Boot time was 10-12 seconds (time to get to login screen), shut down time was 3 seconds.

During the last couple of months, my MacBook Air seems to be have slowed down regarding boot time and shut down time. Current boot time is 50-60 seconds, and shutdown time is 10-15 seconds.

I do not know the reason for this. Applications don't seem to have much lag though. It is my boot time that is a MAJOR problem!

I recently cleared a lot of useless memory on my computer and emptied the trash, and cleared the cache memory (with an app), and computer has a LOT of free space and no applications are loaded on start-up either.

Can anyone tell me how to get back the original boot time performance?

Answer 1

Issue: After entering the password the computer would appear to freeze and become unresponsive. After about 20 mins it would eventually log in. User was claiming that browsing the internet was very slow and he could only access one page at a time.

Resolution: I had unbound the mac from the Active Directory domain and it fixed the issue. As it turns out the computer name had been removed from the AD Computers list.

Answer 2

Check your network configuration.

Delete any interfaces that you don't need. If you have IPv4 configured manually, make sure your IP address and DNS servers are correct. Run Console.app and check your system log for problems during boot up.

As an experiment, create a new Location called "None" with all networking disabled (delete all of the interfaces), select that and then reboot. If it boots faster with networking disabled, then you know something is wrong with your network settings.

Answer 3

Also, you could try verifying the disk.

Open Disk Utility. Click on Macintosh HD in the sidebar. Then click Verify Disk. If there are any errors then click Repair Disk.

Then you might want to also try clicking Verify Disk Permissions and then Repair Disk Permissions

If after doing all this and there is no improvement try backing up your folders and files and doing a clean install. In other-words, completely erasing the whole hard drive and re-installing the operating system from the install disk.

Answer 4

Try Resetting PRAM and NVRAM

1. Shut down the computer.

2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: ⌥+⌘+P+R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.

3. Turn on the computer.

4. Press and hold the ⌥+⌘+P+R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.

5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.

6. Release the keys.

7. Set the startup disk in system preferences and reboot again to test the timing.

Answer 5

The easiest step to take would be to install a clean OS onto an external USB drive so you can assure yourself the hardware is working properly. Yes the internal drive is way faster (when working properly) than an external, but a clean install to even a slow bus powered 2.5 inch drive should be far faster than your benchmark.

If that is as slow or slower than your timings - have it repaired. If not, you can back up and zero the SSD. Hopefully your drive and OS support TRIM and at will allow the controller to mark the entire drive as clean again. Also, this will ensure you don't have a software delay.

Once you are sure the hardware is speedy again, restore your backup.