Why You Don’t Have to Settle for a Slow MacBook Pro?  

Simple ways to fix a slow MacBook Pro

Is your MacBook Pro becoming increasingly sluggish? Does it take an unusually long time to start up, to multi-task or maybe even take forever to simply just shut down?

You are not alone. Thousands of MacBook owners around the world face this problem from time to time. In fact, this problem applies to just about any computer, be it Mac or Windows PC or even a Linux driven PC.

It all comes down to simple maintenance issues. Some of the most critical maintenance issues are discussed in the sections below.

1. Check your MacBook’s free disk space

First things first, you need to check how much of your hard disk space is free. To do this, click on the Apple Menu → More Info → Storage. You will be able to see all the partitions and drives that you have on your Mac, with a clear statistic that will tell you how much free disk space is left on each of your drives.

You must particularly pay attention to the amount of free disk space available on the hard disk where your OS X is installed. This disk will be listed first on the list if you have more than one drive or partition. Try to keep at least 40% of the hard disk space on this particular partition free.

You can easily free up hard disk space by deleting large files like maybe movies, audio playlists or by getting rid of other data that you know you don’t need. Of course, you can save all your data and still make new hard disk space by simply cutting and pasting some data onto an external or portable hard drive.

When you manage to free up some disk space on your Mac’s hard drive, your processor will use the free disk space as memory in addition to RAM, thereby giving you faster performance levels.

2. Carry out repair disk permissions

Your Mac has an inbuilt function called repair disk permissions. Depending on the intensity of issues with your Mac, this simple one-click repair can pretty significantly speed up your Mac.

To run this repair, go to Applications → Disk Utilities → Repair Disk Permissions.

3. Lighten your login list

When you start up your Mac, a bunch of apps start up automatically. Over time, knowingly or unknowingly, as you installed many new apps, you might have mistakenly chosen the option to allow them to start up automatically, as and when your Mac starts up.

If there are too many items in this list, your Mac can take forever to boot up. Even after somehow booting up, it can struggle when you multi-task as it has to also keep all these automatically started apps running all the time.

To change your login list now, go to System Preferences → Accounts → Select Your User Account → Login List. Now, all you have to do is hit the “-” on apps that you don’t need to start up when your Mac starts up. Get rid of as many apps as you can from the login list as it can make a remarkable difference to your Mac’s performance, especially when it starts up.

Removing items from this list will not uninstall any of the apps. It simply removes them from the login list and you can still continue to use them by opening them up like a normal app, after your Mac has restarted.

4. Analyze usage of your Mac’s system resources

Your Mac’s processor and memory are your primary computing resources. The next time you feel that your Mac has slowed down, take some time off to analyze what is hogging these two critical resources.

You can do this by going to Utilities → Activity Monitor. The activity monitor will show you what apps and what programs are consuming what amount of RAM and CPU resources. When you have a slow MacBook Pro or a slow iMac or just any slow Mac, you will invariably find at least two culprit apps that you can then shut down or replace with other more efficient apps.

5. Other ways to speed up MacBook Pro

There are some other ways to fix a MacBook Pro running slow. These methods will involve performing a PRAM reset, a SMC reset or maybe even using software to speed up the Mac. These strategies are discussed in more detail in the link just given to you.