Within a couple of weeks of upgrading to Mountain Lion, I noticed that pages in Safari would often get stuck loading. I’d see a progress bar go maybe half-way, see absolutely nothing load on the page, and it’d just hang there. Once I realized I could launch Chrome and load the same URL instantly, I realized this wasn’t an internet problem.

A friend on Facebook suggested zapping the PRAM, which honestly I thought wasn’t even an option anymore on Intel Macs — but I was wrong!

To zap PRAM, you restart while holding down the command-option-P-R keys, and shortly after the “bong!” chime, the Mac will restart and it’ll “bong!” again. Conventional wisdom (ok old school wisdom) was to do this three times in a row before releasing the command-option-P-R keys, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore. Can’t hurt, I figure.

One challenge though is that this gets tricky with Bluetooth keyboards, since they don’t actually connect until the computer has started booting up. According to this Apple support article http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3273 you have to press the keys at the same moment you hear the chime to get it to connect. Sounds tricky. So if you have an older USB keyboard laying around, that may make things easier.

And oh, yes zapping the PRAM does appear to have fixed the problem. In 24 hours I haven’t seen a single page load delay in Safari — woohoo!