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iMac Start Time

AcesHigh87

AcesHigh87

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2009
986
326
New Brunswick, Canada
How long should the iMac in my sig realistically take to startup right out of the box? For those who can't see it for some reason, it's the 21.5" with an upgrade to the i7. The RAM is still at 4GB because my other 4GB hasn't arrived yet though.

In any case, my macbook was really slow on start and I figured a brand new iMac would certainly be wicked fast to get going. However, it stills seems slow. Once the wallpaper coms up, I'll admit, everything flies compared to what my macbook did but it still takes 30 seconds - 1 minute from when I hit the power button to when it starts.

I did transfer my stuff over using Time Machine from my macbook. Could a software or setting be causing it to be slow or am I just insane and that's actually a regular start time?
 
Ice Dragon

Ice Dragon

macrumors 6502a
Jun 16, 2009
989
20
You should try and max out the RAM at 16 GB and even look into getting an SSD if you want it to be really fast. If you are not comfortable with doing it yourself as some might recommend, OWC can upgrade it for you for $90 professionally.
 
AcesHigh87

AcesHigh87

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2009
986
326
New Brunswick, Canada
I don't care about a massive amount of speed and don't have the money for that kind of upgrade right now. I was just expecting it to be a bit snappier.
 
S

Squicken

macrumors member
Jul 23, 2010
65
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

My 21.5 i5 boots in 25-35 seconds... 12 gigs of ram, but it was still that fast before the upgrade.
 
S

Squicken

macrumors member
Jul 23, 2010
65
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

My 21.5 i5 boots in 25-35 seconds... 12 gigs of ram, but it was still that fast before the upgrade.
 
talmy

talmy

macrumors 601
Oct 26, 2009
4,727
337
Oregon
Lion will tend to be slower because of Resume -- it restarts apps that were running when last shut down. Frankly the solution is to use Sleep (which is extremely low power consumption) instead of turning the computer off. Starting up from sleep takes one to two seconds, and that seems to be in restarting the Bluetooth and network connections.Load up on RAM and keep all your apps running and the system will be as responsive as one with an SSD.
 
W

wxman2003

Suspended
Apr 12, 2011
2,580
294
talmy said:
Lion will tend to be slower because of Resume -- it restarts apps that were running when last shut down. Frankly the solution is to use Sleep (which is extremely low power consumption) instead of turning the computer off. Starting up from sleep takes one to two seconds, and that seems to be in restarting the Bluetooth and network connections.Load up on RAM and keep all your apps running and the system will be as responsive as one with an SSD.
Click to expand...

+1

With the iMac attached to UPS, no reason to power off anymore.
 
basher

basher

macrumors 6502a
May 27, 2011
574
139
Glendale, AZ USA
talmy said:
Lion will tend to be slower because of Resume -- it restarts apps that were running when last shut down. Frankly the solution is to use Sleep (which is extremely low power consumption) instead of turning the computer off. Starting up from sleep takes one to two seconds, and that seems to be in restarting the Bluetooth and network connections.Load up on RAM and keep all your apps running and the system will be as responsive as one with an SSD.
Click to expand...

Sleep works fine for me except when my 2011 iMac wakes it take about 30 seconds for the Firewire drive to spin up and become accessible. Since my iMac has an SSD I've adapted to just shutting down instead of sleeping.
 
AcesHigh87

AcesHigh87

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2009
986
326
New Brunswick, Canada
talmy said:
Lion will tend to be slower because of Resume -- it restarts apps that were running when last shut down. Frankly the solution is to use Sleep (which is extremely low power consumption) instead of turning the computer off. Starting up from sleep takes one to two seconds, and that seems to be in restarting the Bluetooth and network connections.Load up on RAM and keep all your apps running and the system will be as responsive as one with an SSD.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, I kinda forgot about Lion slowing **** down. I’ll probably just deal for now as I don’t have a UPS yet and don’t want to worry too much about my mac when I go to bed at night. Once I get a UPS in the future though I’ll likely just sleep it all the time.
 
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