Other tricks you can try
Yet more tips and tricks to help speed up your Mac
There are plenty more ways to speed up your workflow and your Mac. Adding a second and even a third screen gives you more workspace, making you more efficient.
After doing so, open System Settings and click Displays. Click the Arrange button, and you can relocate the menu bar, and also drag the secondary screen around the main one, setting their relative positions.
Harness accessibility
There’s a wealth of features in System Settings > Accessibility. If you have any kind of disability – or even if you don’t – features such as inverting the screen colours, flashing the screen when an alert occurs or Voice Control might greatly assist your use of the Mac. Explore them and try them out. You can always turn them off again if they don’t suit you.
Master Hot Corners
In System Preferences > Desktop & Dock, click the Hot Corners button. Here you can set actions that are triggered by dragging your pointer into one of your screen’s corners. The range of options is pretty small and you can’t add your own, but if there’s something there you’d like to trigger in a new way, give it a try.
Tame Spotlight
You can do more with Spotlight than just search your Mac. To activate Spotlight, click the magnifying glass in the menu bar or press Cmd+[Space bar]. You can launch apps by typing the name of the app into the Spotlight field and selecting it from the results menu. Type a sum or equation by typing it into the field and it gives you the answer, and conversions are similarly dealt with. It can even convert currencies, drawing their values from Yahoo! Finance. You can also get news reports, sports results, weather conditions, stock prices and more.
Activity Monitor tricks
If your Mac is sluggish and it keeps hanging, check its running processes. Launch Activity Monitor – it’s in Applications > Utilities, and Launchpad > Other. When open, Activity Monitor shows all the processes running on your Mac, along with the percentage of the total CPU and GPU usage they take up, the number of threads they use, CPU and GPU time and more. To close a process that’s taking up too many of your Mac’s resources (perhaps because it’s glitching and needs restarting), click on it and then click the ‘X’ button in the menu bar. You can then quit or force quit the process from a pop-up menu.
Tame visual effects
Too many visual effects can slow down your Mac, especially if it’s getting old. There are several ways to reduce them. In System Settings > Desktop & Dock, turn off ‘Animate opening applications’. In System Settings > Accessibility > Display, turn on the ‘Reduce motion’ option. On this settings page, you can also turn on ‘Dim flashing lights’ (Apple silicon Macs only) and turn off ‘Auto-play animated images’.
Take out the trash
If your boot drive is getting full, your Mac can slow down due to having less storage space to use as virtual memory. Avoid this by regularly emptying the Bin. Click on the Bin to open it as a Finder window and click the Empty button in the top right of the window, or Ctrl-click on the Bin and select Empty Bin from the contextual menu. If you prefer, you can set items in the Bin to delete themselves after 30 days. Go to Finder > Settings > Advanced and check the ‘Remove items from the Bin after 30 days’ option.
Install more RAM and/or an SSD
If you have an older Mac that’s open to post-sale upgrades – ie, you can add more memory or swap the hard drive (HDD) for a solid-state drive (SSD), do so. If you’re swapping the HDD for an SSD, copy the hard drive to your SSD using an app such as SuperDuper! (shirt-pocket. com) or Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich. com). When done, swap the drives so your Mac boots from the SSD, then reinstall macOS without wiping the drive clean first. The procedure here depends on which Mac you have. There are instructions at bit.ly/mac401_apple_ reinstallmacos on how to do it.
Unfortunately, most modern Macs have storage and memory soldered on to the logic board or integrated into the processor, so this course of action isn’t available. That’s why it’s important to buy a Mac with sufficient storage and RAM when you upgrade your computer.
Keep your Mac up to date
Finally, it’s wise to keep your Mac and its apps up to date. Click the Apple menu on the left-hand side of the menu bar to check whether updates are available.