Brand new iMac takes a while to show apple on boot

[nporteschaikin]

I love my new iMac. The one unusual thing is that it takes a while to show the Apple logo when I turn it on... like 20 seconds. Is that unusual?

 

[Hellhammer]

System Preferences > Startup Disk > Select your OS X volume > Click reboot

 

[Fishrrman]

"I love my new iMac. The one unusual thing is that it takes a while to show the Apple logo when I turn it on... like 20 seconds. Is that unusual?"

One thing I immediately noticed when I moved up from OS 10.4 to OS 10.6 on my own (white Intel) iMac is that the boot times _definitely_ increased. Considerably longer.

However, the shutdown time dropped as dramatically.

I'm guessing that with OS 10.6, there are some additional routines and checks going on before the blue splash screen and login get displayed. Not sure as to exactly what they are.

But startup times under OS 10.6 certainly ARE longer for those using spinning-platter hard drives.

Unless you have a MacBook Air, of course!

 

[skiltrip]

System Preferences > Startup Disk > Select your OS X volume > Click reboot

This is what I was going to suggest. When I got my refurb iMac this weekend, my bootup time was noticeably longer than my MacBook Pro. I had to go into the settings to choose my system disk as the default disk. You'd think this would be set out of the box but it's not always.

 

[panzer06]

This is what I was going to suggest. When I got my refurb iMac this weekend, my bootup time was noticeably longer than my MacBook Pro. I had to go into the settings to choose my system disk as the default disk. You'd think this would be set out of the box but it's not always.

This happens because many shops and perhaps apple's Refurb center use network boot to load fresh images on many machines at once and fail to reset the hard drive as the boot device. My engineers used to miss this all the time.

Cheers,

 

[C8XY]

Also, reset your PRAM and NVRAM:

Resetting PRAM and NVRAM

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

I had a slow boot time and also a glitch when the gray screen turned to the login screen, this resolved it.
It deals with the following:

OS X: What's Stored in PRAM?

• Status of AppleTalk
• Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
• Alarm clock setting
• Application font
• Serial printer location
• Autokey rate
• Autokey delay
• Speaker volume
• Attention (beep) sound
• Double-click time
• Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
• Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
• Startup disk
• Menu blink count
• Monitor depth
• 32-bit addressing
• Virtual memory
• RAM disk
• Disk cache

Apple Support