Slow Boot, Troubled Sleep

Question

Hi folks,
My MacBook Pro is taking forever to boot.
When I first bought it, running Tiger, it booted amazingly quickly.
Upgrading to Leopard didn't seem to affect the boot time–at first.
Now those happy days are over.
Most of the boot time is spent with a blank blue screen.
I get the grey Apple logo, no progress bar, then the blue screen forever.
I did extensive Googling, and tried most of the tricks:
deleting font duplicates,
reducing the number of fonts,
resetting PRAM,
resetting SMC,
repairing permissions,
deinstalling older Office versions,
etc. etc.
FWW, I have over 100GB free space on my boot drive.
Nothing helped. And it seems that this problem is widespread. User forums
are full of people complaining about this. No single solution seems to work.
I suspect that there are multiple reasons for this behavior, that different
things aren't working, and the System just keeps trying until it times out.
Then recently I've been having problems waking up from sleep. That's really
cramping my style. Perhaps the two are related? Again, I did lots of Googling,
installed SleepEnabler.kext, etc etc. No luck.
My MacBook Pro is starting to remind me of my old Titanium G4.
I suppose no one has found a solution, and Apple has moved on to Snow Leopard.
Les

Answer 1

Your old Titanium PowerBook should be really quick.
Especially with original supported software installed.
Or a new hard disk drive and max the RAM, too...
About your newer computer's issue.
There may be a need to archive your computer's content
to an externally enclosed hard disk drive (clone everything)
and then use the booted installer's Disk Utility version to
secure overwrite the entire hard disk drive in the Mac; if
needed, choose GUID partition map, & HFS+ formatting.
{A bootable external enclosure, preferably a one with an
AC power adapter and various port options; such as an
OWC Elite 500GB unit with aluminum enclosure; it has
a good brand hard drive within it, and Oxford chipset.}
Either reinstall a totally new system (missing out on any
older bits, files and unneeded items) using the latest up-
date files, which would minimize the footprint of the OS;
and also this would be sure no minor low-level damages
of consequence would inhibit the computer's function.
Or, clone-back the accumulated build-up of the existing
system from the external hard disk drive.
• Bombich Software - Carbon Copy Cloner:
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
And if you have OnyX by Titanium Software (runs free)
available by download from their web site, that can be
run to clear caches & clean up other items often missed.
• OnyX - Titanium Software apps:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english/apps.html
With my Macs, occasionally (every few months) I may
run OnyX in its Automation selection and have all the
check-box options in there marked to run. I also have
this app set to restart itself after it runs any selections
that may require it to do so; since the Mac should be
restarted after running this kind of maintenance. This
app has a preference setting to choose what runs, too.
Another app to consider worthwhile, is AppleJack.
It runs differently and uses a command line.
• AppleJack - Project page:
http://applejack.sourceforge.net/
• Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot? SafeBoot mode:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564
And if the computer can use more RAM, install all it can.
Good luck & happy computing!
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