Slow startup/boot on Leopard

I've had my macbook pro for a few months and I've noticed the boot time has slowed down considerably over time. My mac can get from a cold boot to showing the desktop in no time, but loading everything else after that takes almost 2 minutes. it used to just be a few seconds.

I have tried uninstalling a lot of apps and removing junk from my hard drive but nothing. On Windows, this was easily fixed with apps like CCleaner, TuneUp Utilities, disk clean and defragmenting the disk.

Is there a Mac equivalent to those you recommend, or some in-built function that can fix this?

Thanks!

 

Well OS X automatically defragments small files. And most other maintenance utilities on Mac just provide a means for you to manually run cron maintenance scripts which are built-in to OS X and are automatically run anyways.

How you tried checking Activity Monitor? Maybe there is a specific app that is consuming the CPU cycles. Or under System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items there should be a list of third-party startup items. You could see if there is anything there that shouldn't be.

 

Ah cool, I didn't know that. You're right. I have a ton of apps I deleted but are still on the startup list. I guess uninstalling by dragging a program to the bin doesn't work for all the apps. My mac is booting up fine now. Thanks!