Sister asked me to look at her Mac Mini Mid2010 Core 2 Duo 2.4 ghz, running El Capitan 10.11.6 machine powering a 24" LCD monitor. It took a while to boot in my opinion compared to my wife's MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with 8 gigs of ram and 500 gig SSD derive.

It has 8 gigs of ram and a terabyte SSD internal drive. I ran disk utility and disk warrior on it and the results were ok. She had at one time Norton's anti virus app on on it but It has since been deleted she stated. I looked around and found no remains that I could see. Checked the startup items under her name and deleted some items (one of them was a Norton's login) not used or needed.

Did not look at startup items under her son's login (who is not living there and does not use this unit).

What am I missing?

Is it looking for a network-accessible drive that may no longer be accessible? (DropBox,GoogleDrive,etc)

Is it looking for an Apple Store account?

Is the desktop full of files and folders strewn about? Each one requires a process to be started.

Does a browser launch at login (Firefox,Chrome,Safari,Opera,etc.) with a lot of windows and/or tabs?

...network traffic with long latency
...non-responsive i/o devices
...thrashing memory (small swap area, high page faults)

Is the mini powered off when not in use? That will mess up periodic housekeeping tasks (daily/weekly/monthly) that have to be done when powered on/booted up.

Is Spotlight trying to index the 1TB drive frequently?

(Sorry, just random guesses here)

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=TC

Is the drive nearly full? SSDs need some spare capacity to run at full speed.

Is the boot-drive selected as the startup disk in the System Preferences?

For "I dunno, it just seems off" situations, could try running Etrecheck.

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Will run Etrecheck.

Dealing with sister and husband who are not exactly tech savey. But the joy of tech support is living next door to them so I don't have to travel far if needed or I can bring it home and work on issues they are having.

This is not her main computer. She has a MacBook Pro but tends to use her iPad for most of her stuff.

Desktop was a mess with lots of files but cleaned it up.
Has a Dropbox account and One Drive account but never uses them and will check again to see if she is syncing any files.

Forgot to clear the cache on Safari--will do that.

One thing I think may be a problem is Apple Mail. Just noticed on this machine she has not cleaned up her emails. Would you believe she has emails in the double digit thousands!! Mail loads but my goodness. A discussion will be had about this.

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jh
One thing I think may be a problem is Apple Mail. Just noticed on this machine she has not cleaned up her emails. Would you believe she has emails in the double digit thousands!! Mail loads but my goodness. A discussion will be had about this.

Unread? or just "in" apple mail? My apple mail prob has 200,000 (more?) emails in its database (sent and received) and it runs fine. No slowdowns.

Try a new user?

Not seeing how any of those other potential issues would cause a slow boot.

Maybe a dumb question... are you *sure* it has a SSD?

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

Yep, upgraded memory from 4 to 8 and she had me purchased the SSD drive and I had apple dealer install the drive.

Believe the emails list is unread but will have to check it and see.

Once booted it computer seems to work fine.

Safe boot w/restart.

....sigh.....we all get slower......with age.......

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!

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jh
Yep, upgraded memory from 4 to 8 and she had me purchased the SSD drive and I had apple dealer install the drive.

Believe the emails list is unread but will have to check it and see.

Once booted it computer seems to work fine.

Are her mail accounts still POP? If so, that could be the reason for so many unread emails.