Have you ever considered what exactly is disabled when you press and hold the shift key during the startup sequence of a Macintosh computer running System 7.x? A lot of people think that all of the extra items they have installed will be temporarily turned off, but that is not always the case.

Primary Effects

• MacsBug -- however, MacsBug will load if the option key is also pressed and held down along with the shift key in System 7.5 and later
• All extensions (inits, cdevs, and so on) in the Extensions folder, Control Panels folder, and System Folder
• A/Rose -- even though it is an init and would be turned off anyway, it is explicitly not loaded
• Any software component of type 'thng' will not be registered
• All scripts (for non-roman character input)
• Virtual Memory
• Resources of type AINI, which are AppleTalk drivers; this is where Open Transport gets turned off

Other Effects

• The disk cache is set to 96K in System 7.5 and 64K in System 7.0 or System 7.1.
• The Finder will not launch files in the Startup Items folder, or execute the items in the Shutdown Items folder at Shut Down.

The items mentioned in this article are not all of the items that are disabled by pressing and holding the shift key during startup. Some third--party software not listed here may also be disabled by this action. On the other hand, many third--party software applications are not disabled by this action. They use their own "hot" keys to disable their software during startup. You will need to contact the third--party vendor for more information.

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