Does the new PowerBook boot up more slowly?
Hi, I've just received my new 15" PowerBook 1.67GHz laptop and am trying to figure out why it now boots up more slowly than before. Here's my story.
Immediately after receiving the PowerBook, I reformatted it into three partitions of 40GB (Startup), 10GB (Utilities Startup), and 43GB (Data). I reinstalled MacOS X from the installer DVD that came with the Mac, then transferred all my old data over from my 14" iBook during the startup questioning phase to the Startup partition. After completing this phase and rebooting, it started up fine, as expected. However, I noticed that it took more spins of the wheel during the startup process, and attributed that to the copied file layout on the hard drive.
So, I Repaired Permissions, booted up from my external FireWire drive, ran Norton Utilities/Disk Warrior and then defragmented with a new utility called iDefrag (from Germany). Upon completion of this process and rebooting twice, I noted that it now took 25-26 spins of the wheel during the bootup process vice the 15-16 spins it took previously on my 14" iBook.
Now, after logging in, nothing is slow. Everything starts up quickly, so I don't really think anything is amiss, but I'm left wondering. I perform routine maintenance on about 50 Macs at work and have a pretty good feel for whenever anything is not normal. While this Mac is faster than anything we have at work, and we do have a number of newer Al PowerBooks from 867MHz to 1.5GHz in use, all of these machines routinely boot up with the usual 15-16 spins of the wheel.
Initially, I thought it was the new iDefrag utility. I've previously used Speed Disk, but with Symantec dropping their Mac support I've been looking for a suitable replacement. Today I upgraded our 12" Al PowerBook to MacOS 10.3.8 and used the iDefrag tool vice Speed Disk to see if that made a difference. Oddly, it didn't. After rebooting, it displayed the same 15-16 wheel spins as it had following a Speed Disk defragmentation.
Now Speed Disk and iDefrag lay down their files differently. Speed Disk puts the System files and Applications at the start of the disk, and moves the data files to the end, with a large empty block separating them. IDefrag takes advantage of a new feature in Panther that has a hotfiles area on the hard disk. It places the drive and volume information at the start of the disk, skips around a GB of free space, and then starts laying down everything else, prioritizing the order based on an algorithm I know nothing about, but seems to place key application and system files clustered in the faster area of the platter and the less used stuff further out on the platter. When it's done, there are two blank areas on the disk, the first one I mentioned above, and the remaining unused space on the disk following the used area.
Following my first use of iDefrag, I noticed this difference and attributed it to the trade-off of slower startup to faster user application response after logging in versus the faster startup with Speed Disk, and slightly slower user experience following logging in. However, after using iDefrag on the 12" PowerBook today, and noticing NO difference in the startup spin counts between Speed Disk and iDefrag use, I'm left wondering if there's some hardware difference in the new PowerBooks that might be taking more time during startup now. The 12" PowerBook had 640MB of RAM, so I don't think it's that. And, of course, from bus to hard disk, everything on the new PowerBooks is faster.
So, I'm puzzled. Any ideas? Can any other new 15" PowerBook users post how many spins their laptops are taking during the startup process? My next step is to simply run Speed Disk on the new laptop to see if it behaves differently with the new PowerBook vice the older models.
Thanks for listening... 8)
Immediately after receiving the PowerBook, I reformatted it into three partitions of 40GB (Startup), 10GB (Utilities Startup), and 43GB (Data). I reinstalled MacOS X from the installer DVD that came with the Mac, then transferred all my old data over from my 14" iBook during the startup questioning phase to the Startup partition. After completing this phase and rebooting, it started up fine, as expected. However, I noticed that it took more spins of the wheel during the startup process, and attributed that to the copied file layout on the hard drive.
So, I Repaired Permissions, booted up from my external FireWire drive, ran Norton Utilities/Disk Warrior and then defragmented with a new utility called iDefrag (from Germany). Upon completion of this process and rebooting twice, I noted that it now took 25-26 spins of the wheel during the bootup process vice the 15-16 spins it took previously on my 14" iBook.
Now, after logging in, nothing is slow. Everything starts up quickly, so I don't really think anything is amiss, but I'm left wondering. I perform routine maintenance on about 50 Macs at work and have a pretty good feel for whenever anything is not normal. While this Mac is faster than anything we have at work, and we do have a number of newer Al PowerBooks from 867MHz to 1.5GHz in use, all of these machines routinely boot up with the usual 15-16 spins of the wheel.
Initially, I thought it was the new iDefrag utility. I've previously used Speed Disk, but with Symantec dropping their Mac support I've been looking for a suitable replacement. Today I upgraded our 12" Al PowerBook to MacOS 10.3.8 and used the iDefrag tool vice Speed Disk to see if that made a difference. Oddly, it didn't. After rebooting, it displayed the same 15-16 wheel spins as it had following a Speed Disk defragmentation.
Now Speed Disk and iDefrag lay down their files differently. Speed Disk puts the System files and Applications at the start of the disk, and moves the data files to the end, with a large empty block separating them. IDefrag takes advantage of a new feature in Panther that has a hotfiles area on the hard disk. It places the drive and volume information at the start of the disk, skips around a GB of free space, and then starts laying down everything else, prioritizing the order based on an algorithm I know nothing about, but seems to place key application and system files clustered in the faster area of the platter and the less used stuff further out on the platter. When it's done, there are two blank areas on the disk, the first one I mentioned above, and the remaining unused space on the disk following the used area.
Following my first use of iDefrag, I noticed this difference and attributed it to the trade-off of slower startup to faster user application response after logging in versus the faster startup with Speed Disk, and slightly slower user experience following logging in. However, after using iDefrag on the 12" PowerBook today, and noticing NO difference in the startup spin counts between Speed Disk and iDefrag use, I'm left wondering if there's some hardware difference in the new PowerBooks that might be taking more time during startup now. The 12" PowerBook had 640MB of RAM, so I don't think it's that. And, of course, from bus to hard disk, everything on the new PowerBooks is faster.
So, I'm puzzled. Any ideas? Can any other new 15" PowerBook users post how many spins their laptops are taking during the startup process? My next step is to simply run Speed Disk on the new laptop to see if it behaves differently with the new PowerBook vice the older models.
Thanks for listening... 8)
Comments
Remember, the software on these machines is virtually identical, since I used the startup option to copy stuff from my old Mac using Target FireWire mode.
Panther automatically does some disk re-orginization to optimize boot times. Perhaps it needs a couple of boots to optimize the disk.
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/optimizations/
When I tried previously deleting the BootCacheControl in the /user/sbin/ directory and recopying the one created in the BootCache.kext file (I learned about it last year when that early bug in Panther omitted it), my startup spins actually increased by 10 spins (to 35-36)! I ended up having to do a 10.3.8 update to fix that and get back to 25-26.
I'm still looking forward to hearing from some new PowerBook 1.67GHz users to find out how many wheel spins they're observing.
This new Mac has the 128MB extra VRAM Radeon 9700 mobility card, vice the old 8MB Rage card in the iBook. Does anyone know if that card is checked during the startup process before the wheel starts spinning or after? Might that be the key difference?
A simple side-by-side startup on battery from push button to login screen, showed the iBook beat the new PowerBook by about 6 seconds. I took this comparison a bit further by copying the system.log files from each machine and comparing them. At this detail level the actual startup differential was actually 29 seconds for the iBook and 35 seconds for the PowerBook. I also noted while watching them boot up that the wheel actually spins faster on the new laptop, so that wasn't as good an indicator as I thought it might be.
The period when the PowerBook fell behind the iBook occurred early in the startup process before the Welcome to Macintosh screen. Here's a brief extract of each log:
PowerBook G4 Startup
15:32:55 Restart
Feb 17 15:32:56 localhost kernel: Jettisoning kernel linker.
Feb 17 15:32:57 localhost kernel: Resetting IOCatalogue.
Feb 17 15:32:59 localhost kernel: Matching service count = 0
Feb 17 15:33:05 localhost kernel: AppleRS232Serial: 0 0 AppleRS232Serial::start - returning false early, Connector or machine incorrect
Feb 17 15:33:14 localhost SystemStarter: Welcome to Macintosh.
iBook G3 Startup
16:12:37 Restart
Feb 17 16:12:38 localhost kernel: Jettisoning kernel linker.
Feb 17 16:12:38 localhost kernel: Resetting IOCatalogue.
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: Matching service count = 0
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: AppleRS232Serial: 0 0 AppleRS232Serial::start - returning false early, Connector or machine incorrect
Feb 17 16:12:44 localhost SystemStarter: Welcome to Macintosh.
You can see it took the PowerBook 19 seconds to get from the startup to the Welcome to Macintosh screen, but the iBook only 7 seconds, with the gap opening between the Matching Service Count entry and the Welcome to Macintosh screen. It's in this portion that a series of entries for which the PowerBook seeming to be waiting occur:
Feb 17 15:32:59 localhost kernel: Matching service count = 0
Feb 17 15:33:05 localhost kernel: AppleRS232Serial: 0 0 AppleRS232Serial::start - returning false early, Connector or machine incorrect
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][start]
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [AppleUSBHCIController][StopIsochPipeRead] - mInt1IsochInPipe = 0 - numReadsPending = 0
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][configurePM] ignore = 1
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][setPowerState] 1 (ignore=1)
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][configurePM] changePowerStateTo(0)
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][setPowerState] 0 (ignore=1)
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [HCIController][configurePM] ignore = 0
Feb 17 15:33:06 localhost kernel: [CSRHCIController][start] 1
Feb 17 15:33:14 localhost lookupd[144]: lookupd (version 324.11) starting - Thu Feb 17 15:33:14 2005
Feb 17 15:33:14 localhost SystemStarter: Welcome to Macintosh.
Here's what's happening on the iBook at this stage:
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: Matching service count = 0
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: AppleRS232Serial: 0 0 AppleRS232Serial::start - returning false early, Connector or machine incorrect
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: AirPortFirmware: start Sta f/w download
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: obtaining ID
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: from Registry
Feb 17 16:12:43 localhost kernel: ATIRage128: using AGP
Feb 17 16:12:44 localhost kernel: UniNEnet: Ethernet address 00:03:93:7a:42:58
Feb 17 16:12:44 localhost kernel: AirPortDriver: Ethernet address 00:30:65:15:a8:d4
Feb 17 16:12:44 localhost kernel: IOFireWireIP: FireWire address 00:03:93:ff:fe:7a:42:58
Feb 17 16:12:44 localhost SystemStarter: Welcome to Macintosh.
The system.log for the iBook has none of that HCIController stuff anywhere, which suggests to me that the iBook doesn't have one.
Well, that's about as far as I can go on this issue. However, I'd still like to hear from any new 15" PowerBook 1.67GHz owners. At least the number of spinning wheels they experience during startup should be comparable. Of course, none of this explains why that 12" PowerBook 867MHz laptop we have at work stills boots up in 16 wheel spins.
I guess there's a price to be paid for adding all the latest bells and whistles to my new Macintosh.
Originally posted by Dave Marsh
I'm still looking forward to hearing from some new PowerBook 1.67GHz users to find out how many wheel spins they're observing.
Hi, Dave.
36 spins straight out of the box.
36 spins after installing 10.3.8 Combo.
Will get back to you when I get around to turning off Bluetooth and installing another GB of RAM.
1.67 15"
128 MB VRAM
100 GB HD
512 Apple RAM
SuperDrive
--B
By the way, to get mine back down to the 25-spin range, I ran the 10.3.8 update over using the 102MB combined version. Even though I had done the incremental 10.3.8 upgrade and all was working fine, rerunning the combined version still changed a couple hundred MB of stuff. The reinstallation using the combined version only took about 15 minutes.
Originally posted by Dave Marsh
Thanks. I guess my 25-26 spins following upgrade to 10.3.8 with 1GB RAM is right on target. I was just a bit used to having all the Macs I've been working on taking only around 15± spins.
By the way, to get mine back down to the 25-spin range, I ran the 10.3.8 update over using the 102MB combined version. Even though I had done the incremental 10.3.8 upgrade and all was working fine, rerunning the combined version still changed a couple hundred MB of stuff. The reinstallation using the combined version only took about 15 minutes.
Okay. Disabling Bluetooth took off a good 10-12 spins, leaving me at 24 or so. Removing cds also seems to speed things up.
I just installed a GB of RAM, (so I'm currently at 1.5 GB) and it took 14 spins total. Not bad in my opinion.
--B
I have found that unless you have something bluetooth you use all the time to turn it off because it also eats up battery life too.