Macs have a
perception of being costly but super-fast machines over other brand
of personal computers. I have no arguments over these facts but user
cannot take the performance as granted specially in case of Mac
users. Both, time factor and the usage of the Mac machine will decide
its speed and performance. The older Macs are really the ones that
are pointed for lack of speed. Some of us will think to buy a new Mac
over the old one however; we surely can implement some of the basic
tips to speed up a Mac before letting it off.
Find out
how easy it is to speed up a slow Mac:-
Before
we proceed in any maintenance it's always a good backup of the data.
For Mac, simply grab an external hard drive and run Time Machine or
create a clone copy.
- Verify Login Applications: - Is the boot time of your Mac too slow? The reason may be too many applications launching at time of start-up. To cut down the number of apps in the start-up menu go to 'System Preferences' i.e. control panel of the OS X. Find 'Users & Groups' and click on the 'Login Items' tab to see list of the apps that open during Mac boot-up. Unselect the programs from the menu and next time they won't bother at start-up.
- Clean Up Your Hard Drive: - To recover the hard drive spaces, start uninstalling useless applications from the Mac volumes and remove every piece of unwanted files. Its sure you will end up eliminating plenty of unworthy games, videos, music and tools.
- Feed extra RAM:- The cheapest and easiest way to speed up Mac instantly is to add more RAM. One of the best practices to speed up any aging computer is to upgrade the hardware (RAM), so go for larger hard drive or having more RAM capacity if you want to make an old machine feel younger and work more fastly. Depending on your system requirement you can add RAM; it allows programs to store information into quickly accessible memory, which increases the speed of the system.
- Fasten Slow Applications: – A Mac may not be as slow as some of it's particular applications. Here are a few common culprits.
Safari
– Though Safari is quick, it may slow down the Mac very often. To
make the Safari lightweight again, clear all its cache by selecting
Safari > Reset Safari in the application menu.
Dashboard
– Good amount of RAM is eaten away by Dashboard widgets while in
operation or idle. This wastage of RAM by widgets makes other useful applications to suffer. You can anytime jump to Activity Monitor to
check that application which is consuming most of the RAM. Widgets
are fun to have but not on the cost of Mac's performance.
Firefox – Firefox is
mighty fast browser tool that ends up painful slow either due to
plenty of extensions/add-ons installed or the version of Firefox that
fails to match the OS X requirements. The best way is switching to
the latest version of Firefox 3.5, which shows commendable speed
improvements as compared to its previous versions.
- Clean the desktop – Don't live with the Mac that has a cluttered desktop screen. Due to number of icons, you may see your Mac performance going down. These icons are not just tiny images but actually are windows. Every icon displayed on your desktop behaves like a window of itself and occupies their required spaces on the Mac partition. Though removing unnecessary desktop icons will only save small spaces and Mac won't feel a huge performance difference. But its true, it will make the Mac desktop look more clean and clear.
- Get rid of the extras – These are the mini programs which keep on running constantly in the background of our system and eats up the memory. By avoiding these extras we can succeed in saving good amount of Mac memory.
Some of these extras are listed below.
-
Language file- Let only your default language stay on the Mac OS X and uninstall every other unwanted languages like Russian, Dutch, Spanish etc.
-
Genie effect- It is an action used for minimizing a window in the Dock, Mac animates the process using genie effect to suck the window into the Dock. Same thing goes for maximizing window to its normal state. You can change the Genie effect to Scale effect using Dock option in the System Preferences.
- Check for any unwanted apps on Dock- Make sure your Dock contains most used application icons and try to remove the one you don't need really.
- Disable Widget- Disabling widgets too will help save some amount of space for Mac OS X.
A
Mac may not require big overhauling as the machine itself is
reliable, fast and result-oriented. All you need to do is keep
freeing as much space as possible on the hard drive. This will make
your system faster and it will be tuned and toned as new.