Quickly Control Your Mac Startup Programs

When you first turn on your Mac, different Mac startup programs may launch without your assistance. In fact, it may really bother you that many of these programs launch, as it slows down your ability to jump right into your computer and get work done.

You really just want your machine to load only items that are useful to you or items that are necessary for your operating system to run. Below, MacPro Services explains the 3 main types of startup and login items and how to take control of them.

Login items

Open System Preferences and click the “Users and Groups” icon.

From here, click the “Login Items” tab.

Now, you should be looking at a (perhaps long) list of applications that open every time you log in. This list is different for each user account on your Mac. most of the time, these items appear in this list of Login Items because different downloaded applications have added them to this list of mac startup programs.

Many such applications that do this ask you for permission first or offer an ‘Open at Login’ checkbox for you to check. Unfortunately, not all applications are so well-mannered. In any case, you can remove an item by selecting it and clicking the minus sign (-) button.

[box type=”info”]I’ve found, the most commonly listed login items are iTunes Helper and Evernote Helper. iTunes helper will launch iTunes when a device is plugged into your computer. Evernote helper allows for snippets while browsing the web, but I’ve found that it also has the possibility of causing crashes with Safari at times.[/box]

Startup items

Apple now discourages the use of startup items, but some programs (mostly older apps) still use this mechanism. Earlier mac operating systems relied on the following two folders to hold items designated to load when you start your Mac:

1. /Library/StartupItems and
2. /System/Library/StartupItems

Normally, these folders should be empty. However, if they contain anything that you don’t use anymore, you can drag these to the Trash to prevent it from loading automatically the next time you start your Mac.

To check the contents of these folders, click “Go” from the Finder Menu Bar at the top of the screen. Then, click “Go to Folder…” and type in the above 2 locations exactly as they are written above.

Applications spontaneously reopening at startup

If you are running Mac OSX 10.7 Lion or later, then by default, whatever applications and/or documents that were open when you last shut down, automatically reopen the next time you start your computer. Whether this happens or not, is dependent on the decision you make when you choose Restart or Shut Down from the Apple menu.

In the dialog box, if the ‘Reopen windows when logging back in’ checkbox is selected, the items will reopen. However, you must make this decision before you shut down or restart.

I hope that you found this post helpful. Keep checking back for more ways to optimize your mac and increase your productivity. If you need help with mac repair in Tallahassee, just send us an email or give us a call today.