How to Speed Up Your Mac

There are various things at which Macs are naturally better at. And when compared to Windows in the field of system stability and performance, undoubtedly Macs wins with a great score. When it comes to system slow down, a Mac will take five times more time than windows to reach that stage where user will feel the performance drop. But it’s quite easy to fix also. You need to follow these steps to speed up the OS X before even considering reinstalling the OS X on Mac.

Please note an important thing about your Mac the older the hardware, the more prone your Mac will be to slow downs. For all the scenarios when your Mac’s performance is slowing down, you can try these steps to speed up your Mac.

Quit Apps Properly

Generally when you click on the Red Cross button on the apps, it doesn’t mean they are closed. Sometimes they are still running in the background. And in Mac, when some applications are running in the background a small dot will appear underneath the icon of the app which is running in the background so that its quiet easy to identify the running apps. Now to close the apps you don’t want to run in the background either you can use the combination of the keys Command + Q or you can right click on the app’s icon in the dock and choose the quit option to quit the app. don’t let program running if you don’t need to use them.

Avoid Chrome

This method is worth checking even if your Mac has slowed down. Chrome has various issues because of this it really doesn’t agree with OS X. You should use safari instead of Google Chrome. Chrome also confuses your hard drive and installed apps list really badly and the reason is how it stores extensions, bookmarks and worst of all the Chrome apps. There is no secure way to use Chrome on the Mac unless Google fixes it.

Use Activity Monitor

Generally people are unaware that their Mac comes with a really powerful Activity Monitor that allows you to look at CPU, Disk, Memory, Energy and Network Usage by processes and apps. If your Mac’s system has slowed down then it’s worth taking a look at the CPU and Memory tabs on Activity Monitor to see which apps are consuming most resources. You can also sort the items by how much power or processor they are using so you can easily identify the offenders.

Restart Mac

The power management of Mac is very efficient, even the best among desktop computing platforms. Many people don’t really shut down their Macs, they just shut the lid when don’t want to use and bring it back to life when need it again. This could result in the system not getting rebooted for weeks in a row. If this happens then your Mac will continue to keep alive broken fragments and processes that got corrupted and were not in use. So it’s a good idea to restart your Mac every now and then to prevent your Mac from getting slow.

Review Mac’s Start up Items

There are some programs that will spring to action as soon as the system is booted up and is ready to use. Some of these programs are critical for the working of the OS and others are those which we add ourselves to make our lives convenient. There are numbers of apps that will ask to be launched upon login and you might end up giving them permission to do so. And all this can result in a long, overcrowded list of startup items. So it’s better to review your list of start up and remove anything that’s not necessary for you.

In order to access the login items, launch system preferences and go the users & group pane. Then select your user from the left and click on the login items on the right. Now select anything in the list that’s useless according to you and click on the minus button at the bottom to get rid of that from system startup list.

Clean up your Mac’s Hard Drive

If your hard drive is almost full then it can slow down any operating system. The reason behind it is that the files critical to the system are also being stored and deleted constantly and if less space is available then system will struggle with the space for its items. You should always have more than 10% of your total storage available as free space.

Now you must be wondering how can you check the storage of your Mac… don’t worry just go to the Apple logo at the top left corner of the menu bar and select About This Mac. Now a pane will open, click the Storage Tab to check the amount of available storage and you can also check which file is consuming more space.

After checking storage comes the cleaning part for which you can check the third party programs available. OnyX is a third party tool that does much more than hard drive clean up and is worth checking out. If you want to remove extra language files from your Mac then you should check out Monolingual that can result in freeing up a nice amount of storage space, especially when you don’t require the additional language. And if you want to remove the unwanted apps then you can use AppCleaner that will remove not only apps but also their remains from your Mac.

Reduce Visual Effects

Many people claim that it worked for them but I don’t like this idea. As OS X is attractive due to these effects. So if you are facing a slow system then it might help.

In OS X El Capitan, there are two main areas for doing this. Firstly you need to do it in Dock Preferences, uncheck the following:

• Magnification
• Minimize Windows into Application Icon
• Animate Opening Applications
• Automatically hide and show the dock
• Minimize Window using, here select Scale Effect instead of Genie effect.

The second area is to reduce transparency. Go to Accessibility settings from system preferences then click display and check the box next to reduce transparency.

Please note that this will reduce the look and feel of your Mac, so according to me take this as the last option.

Disable FireVault

Well this method is again one of those areas where you have to sacrifice something to gain performance. FireVault is the OS X’s default encryption technique to protect your personal data and since Yosemite, it is enabled by default. On older Macs this can degrade performance, so you might gain some performance out of disabling it. But it will put your data at risk because it no longer gets encrypted.

To access FireVault settings, go to the security & privacy pane in system preferences. You can turn it off if you don’t need it and restart your Mac once after some time.

Multi-User Logins

OS X has really good account management and multiple users can login at the same time and keep switching between them. The problem arises when several logged in users have programs running in the background even when their account is not in use. This consumes the RAM so it’s better to log off and let other users login instead of switching users.

Run First Aid

This is the rarest, but can happen. Certain files on your Mac get their permissions messed up or some disk blocks might get allocated the wrong size or anything else of this type. But thankfully OS X offers a really easy fix for this. Launch Disk Utility from launch pad and select your primary hard disk on which your OS is installed from the left pane. Then click the First Aid button on the top. This will run a series of operation of your disk that will fix the most of the problems if they exist.

Reset your Mac’s SMC

This is the last measure your should try before reinstalling your OS X. SMC is System Management Controller that is responsible for power management, adapters, video drivers, disk fan controllers and several other things. This is also the reason why resetting the SMC can solve countless problems with your Mac.

Resetting the SMC is different based on the type of Mac that you are using.

If you have Mac without Removable Battery then make sure it’s plugged into a power source and then press Control + Shift + Option + Power keys at same time. Now release these keys and use the power button to turn on your Mac and your SMC will have been reset.

If your Macbook have removable battery then you have to unplug it and remove the battery. Then press and hold the power key for about 5 seconds. Now reinsert the battery and plug the laptop back in and on the power. SMC have been reset.

Fixing a Mac is not easy and there can be so many things that can work while others might not. One of the most obvious things to do would be increasing the RAM and Hard Disk of your Mac but that will be costly. We will recommend backing up photos libraries to an external location like online backup. The worst option is to invest in a new and high speed Mac. After all it’s entirely up to you how you want to manage your Mac but try these measures before trying any of the extreme measures.

Neha Sharma is an experienced technical content writer. She is working with a computer repair service provider company and likes to write unique and informative articles on latest technology and apps. In this article, she discusses about “How to Speed up your Mac”. Keep in touch with her to know more tips and tricks about Apple support Services and Windows 8.