Slow Loading Finder Windows on OS X Mavericks – Speeding it up!

Problems with slow loading Finder windows on Mavericks? If you are using Mac OS X Mavericks and have found the Finder painfully slow to load, you are not alone! Plenty of comments have been posted over on the Apple Forums and solutions have been found.

Fixing a Slow Loading Finder on Mavericks

This is the solution that worked for me and I’m going to thank users Posthumous and Snaggletooth for their work, which I am copying here for anyone else needing help:
1. Open Terminal

2. Type:  sudo nano /etc/auto_master   (using nano instead of vi makes it a little more user friendly) followed by your user password.

3. Press Enter/Return

4. Use the keyboard down arrow to move your cursor to the command:
/net       -hosts      -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid  and add a # to the front so it reads:

#/net       -hosts      -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid

5. Press control + X   to exit

6. Press Y to save

7. Press Enter

8. Close Terminal

9. Reboot

All is well.

I have not experienced any adverse effects from doing this. If you do discover any, just remove the “#” before the command.

other page


3 Comments

  1. Tim

    This worked for me. Tried a lot of other fixes. I’d like to know what it did.?

    • Stuart

      Glad it helped. See the link in the article for more details. (This came from a thread in the Apple support forums.)

  2. mid 2007 imac 2.0ghz 4gb ram. mavericks

    I did a clean install of mavericks. wiped the hard drive from several previous osx versions installed on top of each other. I also did some other tips that helped speed things up in the finder.

    (I had serious finder delays when opening folders, duplicating folders or files in the finder, or moving files and folders to the trash, or burning folders in the finder to CD–took 35 seconds for the insert disk command to come up when burning a folder with 2.7gb of data in it— now its about 4 seconds).

    1. rebuild disk permissions.
    2. turn on file sharing (this helped no idea why, makes no sense but it helped).
    3. in finder prefs, I unchecked: connected servers, back to my mac, and Bonjour computers.
    4. I deleted the finder prefs file, and did a “killall finder” command in terminal.

    try these and see if they help for you.

It's good to talk!

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *