What's Hot and Cool about Restarting


Hot

estarting the computer is a common occurrence for anyone who likes to do funny things to the computer's system file or finder with ResEdit or trying to make maps with Phorte for Marathon, or simply have a persistent error. It is helpful to know how to reduce the computer's restarting time.

f the computer is restarted by the Restart from the Finder's Special menu, then Boot-Up should take a smaller time than normal, this is called a warm start. It is similar to starting a car that has already been driven a way and already has a hot engine. There are only a very few other ways of getting a warm restart apart from this and mostly involve the use of additional software. One way is the restart option that comes with an error message that is accompanied by a bomb (presuming it successfully restarts). Other inventive/ingenious/stupid ways are listed at a page accessible here.

Cool

n the other side are cold starts. These are achieved after a crash, or on first turning power on to the computer. These take a good deal longer as the computer has to verify that its load up drivers are ok and everything is ready for launch. The symptoms of this are a longer time spent with just a 'happy Mac' icon before the "Welcome to Macintosh" message or simply longer with the "Welcome to Macintosh" but before the extensions are loaded.

Frozen

orst of all are when there is a crash during load by due to a virus/extension conflict/booting off a defective floppy and various other reasons. The Mac will then spend time rebuilding its drivers before doing anything else!

Advice

ever restart when a disk is being written to. For more info on this, click here.

bviously, continual restarting can be a problem, speaking from personal experience where, during shadow work, one computer would insist on taking 3.5 minutes to restart warm and it was usually cold, 5 minutes. Not funny when the error that is trying to be caught refuses to be so. Here are a few pointers to help with speeding the time up:

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