Make Your Mac Faster With These Tips

As an IT services professional, it really rattles my nerves when my Mac becomes frustratingly slow. But, worry no more! There are a number of ways you can speed up your trusty Mac again.

Before you engage in any tinkering, I would urge you to be careful and back up your data. For Macs, it’s easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. With your Mac’s drive freshly backed up, you may begin.

Increase Your RAM

First, you need to get the right type of memory for your specific MacBook model. The brand you buy doesn’t matter much, just be sure to buy the right amount, type, and speed. Apple has a handy support page that shows the memory specs for a variety of models, along with a guide on how to replace memory.

Remove Old Mac Apps

Look at your Mac’s Applications and Downloads folders. If there are apps in there you can’t remember installing, odds are you don’t really need them. Move them to the Trash to increase your hard-drive space.

Clean Up Your Apps

Next, let’s tidy up your app clutter. When you install an app on your Mac, the piece of software arrives as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell OS X which users can do what things with specific files.

When these permissions change, it results in your Mac lagging or worse, crashing. What you need is to do some reshuffling and re-dealing these permissions so that they return to their rightful place. To address this, OS X has a built-in tool called Disk Utility that will help you do the job.

Do Away with Big, Unused Files

After doing something to your apps, it’s time to look at the files cluttering your drive. You can use Finder to search for huge files. Open Finder and select the volume you’d like to search. The next step is to choose File > Find (or hit Command-F). Click on the Kind pull-down menu and select Other. When the Select a search attribute window opens, check the box for File Size, uncheck any other boxes, and click OK. Change the “equals” pull-down menu option to “is greater than” and then change KB to MB. Enter a minimum files file size such as, say, 100MB. After doing these, delete the files that you no longer need – or move them to an external drive at the very least.

Minimize Login Items

If your Mac is slow to boot up, the problem may be that there are too many apps to open at startup.

Here’s how to fix it: go to System Preferences > Users & Groups and then click on the Login Items tab to see a list of the apps that open when you boot your Mac.

Highlight the apps you don’t want to open at startup and click the minus-sign button below the list of apps.

Always Keep Your OS X Current

Apple releases new versions of OS X as free upgrades, so there is no way you’re still using old and obsolete versions. New versions of OS X contain performance enhancements and security improvements to keep your Mac running safe and smooth.