Disable startup items

[timelessbeing]

How do you enable/disable startup items in OSX?

Powermacs had extension manager where you could choose which extensions to load at startup. You could even create boot profiles and choose one depending on what you wanted to do with your computer.

When I use my computer day to day, I have various helpful little apps that start at bootup Little snitch firewall, iStat menus, iSync etc.
But sometimes, I need to squeeze every drop performance out of my computer, so I don't want unnecessary memory-resident programs running in the background. If you force-quit them, they just start up again.

How are startup items defined in MacOS? Is there some kind of pref file or script?

 

[MacDawg]

System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items

 

[timelessbeing]

it's empty

 

[brijazz]

it's empty

Press the "+" button and add Applications to launch on startup

 

[timelessbeing]

I said there's programs running in the background even though there's nothing in login items.

 

[LPZ]

I said there's programs running in the background even though there's nothing in login items.

There may be a script in /Library/StartupItems on your hard drive that you need to remove. If things are restarting after a force-quit, there's a daemon relaunching them. Look in /Library/LaunchDaemons or /Library/LaunchAgents for the likely culprits.

 

[timelessbeing]

StartupItems is totally empty.

I found a handy app called Lingon
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lingon/files/Lingon/2.1.1/
It's not as good as extension manager used to be, but it might do the trick.

 

[LPZ]

Look in /Library/LaunchDaemons or /Library/LaunchAgents for the likely culprits.