Occasional slow booting of 2.16 intel core duo Mac

[23skidoo]

(I couldn't find a thread related to this issue; if this is covered elsewhere, please post a link, thanks!)

I have a 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo Mac, which I bought last November, and running 10.4.9. Something I have noticed is occasionally -- I would say once every dozen or so times I turn the computer on -- instead of instantly sounding the chime and booting up, the machine's power light (the one that pulses when the machine is in sleep mode) will come on and the fan will start, but otherwise nothing will happen for about a minute; sometimes it's been as long as three minutes.

After this delay, the chime finally sounds and everything boots up normally.

There doesn't seem to be any correlation between this and, say, installing new software or upgrades. For example, it happened just now and I haven't installed anything lately.

I asked a fellow Intel-Mac-owning friend of mine about it and he says yeah it happens to him to and that it seems to be a random thing. But in all seriousness, is this something to worry about?

And, no, I don't put my computer to "sleep" when it's not in use; I shut it down completely, so it's not a case of me having actually put it into sleep mode by mistake.

On a related note, sometimes when I shut down my Mac it takes awhile to do so-- I get the blue screen with a little graphic that rotates, sometimes for up to a minute, and then it shuts down.

Thanks for any help. Mac isn't nearly as insane as Windows (I was sooo happy to move back to Mac last fall), but it does seem to have its mysteries.

Cheers!

Alex

 

[mad jew]

Mate, just sleep the thing. Anyway, what sort of third party hardware do you have connected to the Mac?

 

[23skidoo]

Mate, just sleep the thing. Anyway, what sort of third party hardware do you have connected to the Mac?

Pardon for the delay in responding but I've been on holidays.

No third party hardware at all. Just the Mac.

And no I don't like sleeping anything. One of the reasons I bought a Mac was so I could actually turn the computer off.

Anyway, since I posted my original question things have been OK, but just now I went to boot up and it took about 4 minutes. First I pushed the button and the sleep light came on and it stayed like that for about half a minute, then it chimed, then the Apple logo came up with the spinning wheel for a good minute and a half, after which the Mac OSX box came up but nothing happened for a very long 20 seconds before the progress bar very slowly went across the box. And then my desktop backdrop came up but nothing else for yet another minute.

Starting to get a bit concerned. No, I have not installed any software or anything, and as I mentioned above, I have no printers or peripherals of any sort, and I have only the barest number of widgets going (3 or 4) because I was noticing they were slowig things down. I DO have Bootcamp with XP installed and I always expect that side to crash and BSOD on me (indeed it has, twice, in the last 5 months). Otherwise, nothing fancy.

This is one of two weird things my Mac has done since I bought it at Christmas. The other was on two occasions the fan started to roar, both times while I was running Google Earth, but since I disabled the "3D Buildings" option that hasn't happened again. I assume for whatever reason GE was causing my Mac to overclock itself because of the buildings graphics.

So my question still stands from earlier -- is this something to be concerned about, or is this just a random thing Mac does once in awhile? If so, then it's all good, if a little annoying. But I do all my business work on this Mac and let's just say if it becomes (or has become) unreliable, that's a really bad scene for me right now.

Cheers!

Alex

PS. Make that 3 things. For some reason the Activity Monitor utility never works. Every time I go to use it I doubleclick on it and it automatically closes without doing anything...

 

[mad jew]

Use Disk Utility to verify your drive. Installing Boot Camp often wrecks the file system of your hard drive but Disk Utility can usually repair it. Of course, you can't repair the drive you've booted from so if it comes back with errors you'll need to either boot form the OSX disc and use that version of Disk Utility, or you'll need to run fsck. Keep repairing your drive until it makes no changes.

A few things to note:

• Boot Camp is a beta product at this stage. Installing a beta product is always a little risky so bare that in mind.
• Your Mac runs certain periodical tasks every day at early times in the morning. If your machine is shut down it cannot run these tasks. If your machine is asleep then it also cannot run these tasks but it will run them at the next available time. Considering the sleep mode uses barely any power and almost all components are switched off, it may be a good idea to start using it. On the other hand, you can run the tasks manually via Terminal or a third party app. The Terminal code is as follows:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly