Why has booting become slow?

Question

Hi there. Whenever I turn on my macbook, it takes almost 10 minutes to reach the login page. This just started happening recently. Do you know what this can be attributed to and how I may fix it? Could it possibly be because of holding down the power button to shut it down the last two times? Thanks!

Answer 1

When you say "10 minutes" do you actually mean that... or are you just tossing that number out there?
In general, a forced shutdown (by holding down the power button) won't cause any major problems, but you can corrupt data on the drive if it happens to be writing when you force it to shutdown... doing this often can, over time, cause issues (although it won't physically damage anything).
As was previously mentioned, knowing why you had to force your computer to shut down in the first place may be a good place to start. If you were not able to shutdown properly, that would be a sign that some process is hanging (it could be due to hardware issues as well... but this is less likely). What were you doing the two times you were forced to shutdown with the power button? Were you doing the same thing both times? If you do the same thing, does it result in your system locking up each time? As much info as you can provide would be helpful.