An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link Chances are that most of the time when you hop on your Mac, you go through the same first steps. For me, it's checking my email (in horror), ...

Startup programs are apps or utilities that launch automatically as soon the operating system boots up. On macOS, startup programs are called login items, and they save you the time and effort you’d ...

Photo: David Snow/Cult of Mac Years ago I was a regular Mac user who switched to PC for a long time. When I fully re-immersed myself in the Apple ecosystem, an old annoyance came right back — all ...

Show of hands...how many of you have heard of Startup Items in Mac OS X? No, I am not talking about the list of items (that used to be called Login Items) that appear in the Startup Items tab in the ...

Remember back when you bought your computer? It was blazing fast, started up as soon as you hit the power button, and everything was clean and tidy. If your machine is a few years old, it’s taken a ...

Apple includes a Safe mode in its Mac startup options that can help you work out if a problem is being caused by software that loads as your Mac boots up. It's particularly useful for resolving issues ...

A minor puzzle arrived from a reader who was trying to choose his boot drive by holding down the Option key at startup. OS X has a variety of keyboard combinations you can press to invoke different ...

Numerous issues with stalls and complete failures during startup are covered in our tutorial "Startup fails (particularly after a system or security update); solving." That article, however, deals ...

Apple has improved macOS’s upgrade process tremendously over the years. With recent releases, it’s rare something goes pear-shaped and prevents an upgrade from completing. However, you can sometimes ...

Apart from the default startup disk, Mac computers can be set to start up from a different disk like an external drive, network volume, or a USB flash drive. This article explains the process for ...

Apple is officially bringing back the Mac startup chime with macOS Big Sur, four years after removing it in a previous version of the operating system. The classic Mac sound was removed from Apple's ...

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