Any quick fix,speed up iMac ?

My IMac seems to take about 2 minutes to boot up and kick in before I can start using safari,I remember 18 months ago that it took about 40 seconds.

So my question is what can I do to get it back where it was without complicated instructions or people telling me to buy something that does this on the internet.

I don't want to have to go through all the technical stuff like partitioning the hard drive,all I need is something that will do this already part of the Mac programs and is simple and easy to use without complicated instructions.

I'm sure I could get this back to how it was,I guess I could ring Apple as I have 3 year Apple Care but to me this is a issue I should be dealing with and I'm convinced I could some how clean it without doing a reinstall or something.

Cheers in advance if anyone has a simple clear procedure,pleas no technical jargon as I'm someone who justs gets buy and don't use 95% of what this IMac does.

First thing to do is run the Disc Utility that comes with your iMac it will be in the Utitlities folder in you Applications.
Click on your hard drive in the left hand column and then click FIRST AID at the top of the right column. To see if you have any disc permission issues click verify if it shows any click repair disk permissions.

That can sort out some problems. There is a useful article on CNET

Also meant to say that while you are there verify the disk as well.

Edited by deleted (Fri 27-Sep-13 15:48:47)

Cheers matey for that

I imagine that jpl1953 was referring to this article.

If your Mac is just slow to boot but otherwise OK then Step 2 would be a good one to try.

eta- any apps that you've set to "Open at login" (from its Dock options) will be in there, I used to do that routinely for Safari (about a dozen tabs!), iTunes etc until I found out how much it slowed down a reboot

Edited by billford (Fri 27-Sep-13 16:38:30)

Thanks for that mate i had a lot of iTunes permissions wrong or something,about a list of 400....i clicked repair after it done the scan and under each error in the box it said repaired.

I then ran the verify disk and it found no issues...

Only got 5 things listed and 2 of them are sat navigation like tom tom and garmin which i have now disabled.

They shouldn't cause any problem, and without them you'll have to check for map updates yourself- I use the Garmin one.

I'll be interested to know if repairing permissions had any effect- I've never found it ever made the slightest difference to anything.

Which is as you'd expect; either the permissions will allow the OS/app to do what it needs to do or they won't. If they won't then you'll soon know about it, if they will then the fact that they're not what Apple prefer is irrelevant.

Let you know later tonight when I power on the IMac before bedtime.

OK

As a side issue, when you boot it up try running Permissions verify again- you'll probably find those iTunes errors it "repaired" are still there.

Up until Mountain Lion permissions maintenance in OS X was a complete mess, although it never had any effect on anything. It seemed to have been sorted in Mountain Lion, but the latest iTunes update seems to show that someone at Apple has a hankering for the old days

Remember that when booting OS X Restarts the programmes that were running before you shut down, you can disable this from the shut down dialog.
Check your log in items in your account pane so you are not starting up some programmes that you don't want or need.