Speed up your (Intel) Mac’s Restart / Shut Down process

It’s not he first time that I hear people saying:

If you install Windows (using Boot Camp) on your (Intel) Mac, it will make your Mac run really slow!

I always thought this is some kind of a joke because they (the two operating systems) are sitting on different partitions…so how can they interfere with one another? Well, it turns out that with / without installing Windows (using Boot Camp) on your (Intel) Mac DOES make a difference…at least it makes a difference on the Restart / Shut Down process. I accidentally discovered this when I decided to reinstall Windows on my iMac…so the first think I did was to delete the Boot Camp partition and give the computer a restart. I was quite surprised @ the speed of the Restart process! This also applies to the Shut Down process as well! At first I thought this is just my iMac’s problem, so I give my MacBook a try…but I can’t delete the Boot Camp partition…I need Windows for my work…so what can I do? Hmm…I could try to Eject my Boot Camp partition like how I eject my pen drive / external hard drives…but I’ve never tried that before…so let’s give it a try…and…it works! Finally compared the Restart time on my MacBook, and here is the result:

With Boot Camp partition: around 40 seconds -_-
Without Boot Camp partition: around 7 seconds!!!

This is certainly a very strange phenomenon…but before I find out the real reason behind this, I won’t point my fingers @ Apple / Microsoft (E.g. I’ve got NTFS 3G installed, the problem might come from that instead)…so for now, if you’ve installed Windows (using Boot Camp) on your Mac and you want a faster Restart / Shut Down process, you could just eject your Boot Camp partition before you Restart / Shut Down the Mac OS X. If you are not sure how to do it, just follow the step by step guide below:

If you’ve got Windows installed on your (Intel) Mac, you will notice that there are two volumes sitting on your desktop…one is for Mac; the other is for Windows. Here is a screen shot of my desktop, take note of the two volumes on the upper right corner. (the icons will look different on your Mac)

The top one is for Mac; the bottom one (Untitled) is for Windows.

Step 0: Select the Windows volume (the bottom one in my case):

Step 1: Move your mouse onto the Menu Bar, and click on File:

As you can see, you can actually eject the Windows volume the same way as you eject your pen drives / external hard drives.

Q. What if I accidentally selected my Mac volume instead? Will it shut my system down immediately?
A. Lets find out

Step 2: Select the Mac volume (the top one in my case):

Step 3: Move your mouse onto the Menu Bar, and click on File:

As you can see, you can’t possibility eject your Mac volume! So don’t worry, you won’t damage your computer if you’ve selected the wrong one

Step 4: There are two ways to eject a volume, one is by using the Menu Bar, the other is by using a keyboard shortcut (the way I preferred):

As you can see, Command + e will also let you eject your volume / pen drive / external hard drive; its much faster as well, because you don’t have to use to your mouse to go through the menu system! Don’t get scared by the amount of keyboard shortcuts offered by Mac OS X, if you learn just one / two shortcuts everyday, sooner or later, you will learn them all! Just don’t try to remember everything in one go!

Are my steps clear enough?

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