Using OS 10.6.8
Every month or two I'll have a hard crash on my MacBook Pro and I'll have to force reboot by holding down the power button. No big deal, I've been doing this on various macs since 1995 since OS version 7.1.
What drives me absolutely bonkers in 10.6.x is that in certain cases like a hard power-cycle, OS X Snow Leopard insists on resuming all 20 or 30 applications I had running before the hard reboot.
Is there some way to tell the OS just never ever ever (ever!) to resume my applications at boot time? I've done everything I can via system preferences and tinkertool of course.
Please help! It takes literally 20-30 minutes for my computer to get up and going in some cases (16 GB RAM, tons of applications running) and if this happens while I'm with a client it's incredibly embarrassing.
I just want a fresh start. Do I have better options in 10.7+?
Best Answer
Just to mention, 15 minutes to boot is way too much, no matter how many apps you have. I haven't seen that boot time since windows XP. 16 GB of ram and a slow hard drive may be your problem, so I'd consider an SSD which will speed your boot time up to 30 seconds.
Also make sure you don't have too many apps in your login items. Remove stuff you can start manually later when you need them.
Finally make sure you have enough drive space, with 16 GB of ram, you need that amount of space to store the ram contents during suspend/resume and other operations.
Anyway, in Lion (tho I recommend Mountain Lion instead) you can disable the Resume of applications straight from the System Preferences (and there are other tricks as well, easy to find).
If you are really going to switch to something other than Snow Leopard, I'd go Mountain Lion. I would venture and say Lion was the Windows Vista of the modern OS Xs :)