Michael Lauden

Difficulty Level: Easy

Time Required: <1 minute

Startup in Tiger or Leopard taking a while? If you want an up-close and personal view of what’s actually going on inside your computer, A cool trick you can do is enable Verbose Booting.

If you just want to see what’s actually going on inside your computer then Verbose Booting will give you everything your heart desires.

Let’s enable Verbose Booting.

ver·bose

adj

-Abounding in words, containing more words than necessary. Long winded, or windy; Of or pertaining to languages that take longer to speak than other languages.

Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows all have something called a GUI startup. GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. In OS X it’s the familiar grey screen, which invokes a chime.

Code is still running, but it’s going on behind the scenes. Enabling, or disabling Verbose Mode does not change anything on your computer. It simply allows the running code to show up on your screen, and is often used to debug a machine.

To enable Verbose Booting, fire up Terminal and type:

sudo nvram boot-args=

When you reboot, you will see glorious command line flowing on your screen such as:

Re-Enabling the GUI startup, and Disabling Verbose Booting is just as easy.

Back in Terminal, type:

sudo nvram boot-args=”-v”

This time, rebooting will yield the normal grey screen startup screen with the prominent Apple logo, and also re-enable the startup chime.

That’s it! Pretty cool tip!

If you have any questions please let me know!