macosstartup
Recently my Mac mini became quite slow without a real apparent cause. I'd really like to be able to trace down the cause of this slowness, and I'd like to do it myself, not using a program.
Is there a good Mac OS X resource website that could lead me to that?
Smart Folders are 'virtual folders'. They're useful for automatically adding or removing items that fit certain criteria.
For example, I have a Smart Folder called 'Wallpapers'. I've made the criteria for entrance to this Smart Folder:
As such files appear (or are removed) anywhere on my system, so they'll be added to or removed from the Smart Folder.
When I'm done I can just delete the Smart Folder without deleting the files that reside inside it.
NB: The default behaviour is to add Smart Folders to the Sidebar. You can uncheck that option when you create the Smart Folder or you can simply drag the Smart Folder out of the sidebar to anywhere you wish. I've chosen the Desktop.
This link has a good overview of how they work.
The only way to do this if you really want to have a "clean state" is by manually copying your documents, music, photos, etc to an external hard drive
Personally I wouldn't do this. If you're a programmer you know that you're going to lose a lot of stuff. What I'd suggest you instead is just to try to find the cause of the slowness.
Check this:
Best Answer
Couple things to try:
You'll see a narration of the start up processes.
There's lots of things that can lead to slow startups, but I'd be on the look out for permission and network timeout errors.