Disabling Startup Processes

[davidcsk211two]

Recently, I started up Activity Monitor to see what background processes were running on my Mac (old iMac G5, 1.8Ghz, 512MB), and found that there were quite a few redundant startup processes.

As such, does anyone know how I can disable them from starting up altogether? I know that I can manually end the process, but when I restart the computer, that same process will load again. I want to end it once and for all...

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[DeltaMac]

You will find that most processes are inactive - they become active when needed. OS X (and the BSD layer) is pretty good about handling those processes.
How will you decide which processes aren't needed by the system (and your own apps)? Most processes load initially, then if not used, become inactive after the system starts up. They just wait until the system needs that process. printing (the cupsd process) is a good example. You will see that is inactive, until you print something, then cupsd, and some other processes depending on the printer in use, will go active. Printing done, cupsd goes back to sleep. It's all part of the system taking care of itself.
If you decide to disable parts of the system processes that seem unused, you may get unexpected results.

note - If you have 512MB of memory, that's not a lot! You would be treating your Mac very nicely if you added 512MB (or more), and the effects of those inactive processes, and the active ones, would be less noticeable. What does that mean for you? A smoother, more stable system, and you might notice an immediate increase in apparent speed.

 

[billbaloney]

Do you actually mean "redundant", as in duplicate? If there are two instances of processes that should only have one instance, e.g., launchd, that would be strange. But if you mean "redundant" in the sense that DeltaMac used, i.e., "processes that don't seem to be useful but are running anyway", then you should take his advice: instead of hacking your machine's startup configuration, just triple your memory. You'll never again worry about the processor toll of inactive processes.