Basic clean up Mac tips for OS X 10.9 and 10.10
There exist over dozens of basic and free tips that can help clean and speed up slow Yosemite and Mavericks OS X hard drives.
1) Target few icons on the desktop: Remove unnecessary icons from the Mac desktop. The number of icons collectively eats some amount of drive spaces. This little tip is just the beginning and won’t make any huge performance differences.
2) Keep Trash Empty: Remember you are the house keeping staff for Mac and it’s your responsibility to empty the trash every then and now. A Mac’s trash can hold up to 15 GB of deleted data.
3) Restart Mac: Just like everyone, your Mac will love to start afresh.
4) Login items: Cut down the list of login items using System Preferences. Some apps cause sluggishness during OS X startup.
5) Tidy up Dock: Cut down the icons on the Dock, keeping minimum but required icons only.
Note: Accidental deletion is one of the most common and regretting way of loosing important data. If you have done something like this and want to restore files then do take a look at the article - How can I recover data from Empty Trash?
Intermediate Mac Cleaning tips for OS X10.9 and 10.10
6) Re-launch Finder: Yes, you heard it right. Whenever Mac goes into deadlock, the best way to come out of it is to use Force Quit<<Finder<<Relaunch. It definitely clean up the cluttered for a moment and help OS X gather resources for fresh start.
7) Disk Utility<<FirstAid: Make full use of available options in First Aid tab of Disk Utility. You can fix light wear & tear on disks. Options to be used are: Verify & Repair Disk Permissions and Verify & Repair Disks.
8) Turn Off least operated items: Among them includes Universal Access, Bluetooth, Speech Recognition and Internet Speech.
9) Stop Animation: Use Dock>>System Preference to stop Animation of Opening Applications.
10) Uninstall: You can immediately save plenty of valuable disk spaces by removing unused applications, widgets, plugins and software.
Advance tips for cleaning Mac OS X10.10 and 10.9
11) Reindex Spotlight:
- Go to System Preferences<<Search Spotlight in search bar
- Spotlight tab opens. Click Privacy
- Add or Remove a folder or drive using + and –
- Upon confirmation Click OK
- Close Spotlight
12) Clear Junks:
- Click Finder<<Go<<Go to folder<</Library/caches and delete all caches
- Click Finder<<Go<<Go to folder<</Library/Logs and delete all logs
13) Remove Duplicates: Launch iTunes<<View<<Show Duplicate items and delete all Xerox files. To get rid of other duplicate files from Mac Hard Disk Drives use a smart duplicate finder for Mac OS X.
Free Mac cleaning software for Yosemite and Maverick
14) Stellar Speedup Mac – helpful for free cleaning of Mac startup drive
15) Disk Inventory – helpful in managing files on Mac disk
16) Appcleaner – helpful in removing unwanted apps from Mac HDD
Additionally, if you agree to spend up to few hundreds dollars on improving Mac performance then immediately get a compatible Solid State Drive and 8 – 16 GB of Random Access Memory for your slow Mac computer. The two-hardware update might involve some expenses but it will be worth in long term.