Resourse hogging startup items

Yes, it seems that Macs have them as well. However, unlike Windows, OS X has a very nice and user friendly list which is easily accessible in System Preferences for editing these things.
Seeing as my Mac experience is nowhere near as great as my Windows experience, I was wondering which services are useless and which are not.

The iTunes Helper is definitely one to remove, as it will start up when you open iTunes anyway.
MicrosoftAUdaemon is the MS Office updater, which I think does have its uses, but not sure whether it should be a startup item.
StuffitAVRDaemon is also one I'm wondering about. I have killed it off and everything seems to be doing just fine without it. So far.

 

You are likely right, but until my current Mac boot time of about 10 seconds starts to creep towards my Windows boot time (on a different but similarly configured PC) of two minutes, I'm not going to worry much about it ;-)

Are you experiencing long OS X Boot times? How long? Do you have a screen shot of your OS X startup items? I might not be able to narrow it down exactly but I have q quick boot time and I can at least identify whats the same on mine so you can concentrate on the rest.

 

Nope, I am not experiencing long boot times at all. I am just an optimization freak (probably due too much Windows exposure) and want to optimize everything.

 

mmm...Linux...

 

I'm not quite sure how OS X does it but it boots considerably faster (about twice as fast) than Fedora Core 6 on my MacBook. Maybe OS X cheats and loads things after it looks like its done, but if it does I can't catch it ;-)

 

bleh, FC6 is a beast. SOOOO slow. But I guess thats part to the fact that it's being virtualized through XEN. I use it for my server right now. Good got it's so much slower than some of the other Linux distros. I mean, it's like a 3 minute boottime.

Pretty fast on my MBP when I'm using Parallels, but still noticibly slower than say, Ubuntu (not my favorite distro!).

 

So what a good fast Linux distro that works well on a Mac? (And I don't want to hear OS X - lol)

I just use Fedora cause thats what I've used for a long time (since when Red Hat was free).

 

Hrm, Ubuntu is very fast. But really, I think I've only played with Mandriva, Ubuntu and FC6. Previous FC releases should be faster.
I still stick with Fedora because of it's support and package management. Mandriva used to be my favorite, but I dunno... the last release didn't impress me for some reason.
I really can't suggest any faster distros. It really will depend on what you want to use it for. Linux has become quite a beast lately. I remember when it would only take a few hundred megs to a gig. Now if you want to install KDE or Gnome, your at like, 2 gigs before installing much software.

I should just learn to be happy with the command prompt :-D

 

I like Mandriva a lot, but I might be biased since I worked (volunteered) as a translator there for some time. It's not a "newbie" distro such as Linspire, and not a stripped down distro such as Ubuntu; yet, one can arguably say it is not a hardcore distro such as Debian or Slackware. But I always thought its level of polishness one of the best around, and there was never anything I'd like that it didn't have. Perhaps some of its packages could be newer. You might give it a try. Also, SUSE has always been high praised but I personally wouldn't touch it after the shady deal Novell did with MS.

 

Yeah the good old Windows days. I remember I optimized my X60 so much that I got a BSOD that required a factory restore. And all this happened the day I got it too. After 6 hours of reinstalling and re-optimizing, all that payed off as I now get a ~3 sec boot time to login/finger swipe and ~30 seconds to full XP boot up which is when the HDD stops seeking.