Speed ​​up your Mac startup. Advanced level

As we mentioned in a previous post, when the OSX boots, it will load certain applications before showing the desktop, either because they monitor part of the system or because they offer a service from the start. In that first post, we have outlined the basic actions that a user who has just arrived OSX should know.

In this new post, we're going to dig a little deeper and show where we can make more changes and where those starter items are stored. In this way we will know even more how to accelerate the startup of our Mac when we notice that a slowdown has occurred.

As you know, in OSX the applications are self-contained executable folders, that is, they do not need an installer when introducing them into the system. However, you may have noticed that some of them, such as Office for Mac, have a installer which is the one to install startup scripts to launch services or small utilities that the application will use later. Another situation that you may have encountered may have been that you have removed an item from the "Startup Items" of the user session and it continues to run at startup. What can be happening in these cases? Let's see below how to control all these situations and enrich the ways that together with those of the post published in previous days will help you to start up your Mac faster.

• In the previous post we recommended that in the "Startup Items" of the user session you can select which applications we want to run during startup or not. This is the first step we must take.

• Now it is the turn of a new action that we have not told you about before, it is about "StartupItems". These startupItems with packs usually made up of scripts and configuration files of the installed applications and are launched just at the end of the startup process and before starting the session. These types of items are used by developers to provide services to system users. In this case, those that interest us are located on the route Macintosh HD / Library / StartupItems this being the folder available for third-party programs and another folder named in the same way in Macintosh HD / System / Library / StartupItems, but in this case it is used exclusively by the system if it needs it and it may not contain anything. Well, now that you know where these two folders are located, we are not going to go into detail about everything that is saved in them, in your case you just have to know that everything that is inside these folders is started before entering in the session, so if at any given moment we uninstall a program, we have to make sure that there is no file related to it. If you are not sure if the file is missing or not, you move it to another location, restart, verify that everything is fine and finally delete it without problem.

• We continue with the "LaunchAgents", which together with the Daemons are two services controlled by launchd, a unified manager of this type of services that uses OSX. LauchAgents are files with a .plist extension that launch scripts of different types. Those of our system are located in the folder Macintosh HD / System / Library / LaunchAgents and the rest in Macintosh HD / Library / LaunchAgents. In both cases, these configuration files are launched whenever a user starts up when entering a session. In addition, within each user there is another folder of these files with more personalized settings and they are located in the folder "user ”/ Library / LaunchAgents. Within those folders you can find a trace of programs that do not finish leaving our hard drive. What we have to do is locate and delete them manually.

• Finally we talk about the files "LaunchDaemons". The main difference between these and the previous ones is that the daemons can be invoked without the need for a user to be logged in, and the Agents they always act on your behalf. In this case, they are also services that are started before any user session. They are located in the folders Macintosh HD / System / Library / LaunchDaemons and in Macintosh HD / Library / LaunchDaemons. Here we can also check, never in the system folder, the files that are linked to applications that we no longer use and delete them.

Be careful and you should always carry out these actions under the path that is not the System path, since on that path it is the operating system itself that manages its own services.

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