Is your Mac sluggish? Boost it with these tips!
Performance enhancements come in all shapes and sizes. Some you can do right away, some take more planning. Here they are, from easy to hard
You can be forgiven for thinking your Mac is slowing down; it might not just be your imagination. There are fair a few factors that can affect your Mac’s performance.
Software’s a frequent culprit; over time, we have a tendency to install software that will run when the Mac first starts up, loading itself into memory, demanding the attention of the CPU and eventually bogging down the system.
We can also slowly outgrow our hardware over time. Changes to the operating system, increasing resource demands from ever-evolving applications and our changing usage will all affect how fast your Mac runs.
When it comes to performance, there are a lot of things you can do right off the bat to try to make your Mac run better – quick and easy fixes that might help to ameliorate some of your Mac’s slowness. Over the long term, you may want to consider some other fixes that will give your Mac a permanent boost in speed too.
Clear your desktop
If you’re accustomed to leaving a lot of files on your Desktop for easy access, it may be easy for you to find, but did you realise that you’re slowing down your Mac? The Desktop is the first screen the Mac has to load, and if it’s cluttered with dozens of icons, that’ll take more time to render. Bear in mind that the Mac treats items on your Desktop as separate windows, and has to generate thumbnails on the fly. Try putting them in folders, preferably away from the Desktop, for maximum benefit. A clean and tidy desktop is a fast-loading one.
Restart
If errant programs are bogging down your Mac’s performance because they’re hogging attention from the CPU or have eaten up all your RAM, giving the Mac a quick restart can often be the fastest way to getting back some pep. That’s the memory and CPU equivalent of flushing the toilet, returning your Mac to a less cluttered, congested state.
Do you need all these apps to launch when you log in? Might be time for a cull…
Reduce the number of startup items
Startup items are software that will automatically open when you first log in. If you’ve ever granted an application permission to start up with your computer, you’ll likely find it in System Preferences (see left). Each one of them will take the Mac a bit of extra time to start up, leading to the perception of slower performance. What’s worse, each of them are running, taking up memory and cycles from the CPU. Figure out what you don’t need and remove them by selecting them and clicking the minus button underneath.
Make space on your hard drive
Unless you have gobs of RAM, chances are that OS X is going to have to use some hard drive space for swap files. Those swap files contain written out information about what was in RAM, to make space for other application software to run. If you’re short of disk space as well, the Mac will have to keep reading and writing to smaller swap files, and eat away at performance.
Use cleaning Utilities
Your Mac creates temporary files called caches that store information on various aspects of your machine’s operation. Some of these are log files that have little intrinsic value (they’re mainly for developers). Over time these log files can build, wasting hard disk drive space and potentially leading to performance issues. There are tools you can download to help clean out these logs, such as OnyX (titanium.free.fr, free), or popular maintenance tool Cocktail (maintain.se/cocktail, $19).
Upgrade the operating system
Mavericks makes a number of under-the-hood changes to improve efficiency, particularly in the way the CPU manages requests from concurrently running applications and also in how it handles memory. If you’re running a Mac with Snow Leopard or later that meets the needs of Mavericks, you should consider upgrading – it is free, after all. Get it from the Mac App Store.
Upgrade your Mac with more RAM
The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina display have, alas, been equipped with RAM chips that are soldered on to the motherboard. Upgrading them with new hardware is nigh-on impossible. If you’re using a different Mac model, however, including older MacBook Pro
systems, original MacBooks, or desktop Macintosh systems such as the Mac mini, iMac or Mac Pro, upgrading RAM is possible, and can provide a solid bang for the buck.
Upgrading the RAM on an upgradable Mac laptop can be tricky. DIY sites like ifixit.com will walk you through the process, but unless you have the right tools, you may be better off having more RAM put in by a professional.
On the Mac mini, Mac Pro and most iMacs, upgrading RAM can be as easy as removing an user-accessible access door and adding or replacing the chips inside with higher density ones. Some Macs, like some 21.5-inch iMacs, are not user-upgradable, sadly.
Replace your Mac's hard drive with an SSD
If your Mac still uses a conventional hard disk drive, you should definitely consider replacing it with a Solid State Drive (SSD). The cost per gigabyte for SSDs is still much higher than a conventional hard drive, but the performance benefit is worth it. What’s more, SSDs are more durable than a regular hard drive. They have no moving parts, so they’re quieter and use considerably less power too.
A regular hard disk drive is like a record player – a platter rotates around a central spindle at a high rate of speed – usually 5,400rpm. An arm extends outward above the surface of the disk, and a sensitive magnetic head reads and writes by changing the polarity of microscopic segments of that platter. It’s the same way that hard drives have worked for decades – they’ve just become smaller and more sophisticated.
While an aftermarket SSD designed to replace a hard drive looks broadly the same, inside is non-volatile flash memory that remains in state indefinitely when you power down the machine. But because it’s memory chips, not a spinning platter, it loads faster.
Replacing a conventional hard drive with an SSD can be a fairly straightforward process. You just have to format it with Disk Utility and then restore your Time Machine backup to it. Easy!