After a while, any computer can start to slow down. They get filled up with programs and files, and the work of running smoothly becomes harder. If your Mac has started to slow down, there are some ways that you can improve its running speed, to restore your Mac to its former glory. Here’s how.
Image – free for commercial use
Find Resource Hungry Programs
Some apps use more power than others, and can this can slow your Mac right down. To find which apps are causing you problems, you can use the Activity Monitor. The Activity Monitor looks at five different resources; CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, and Network usage. The CPU section is the main place to pay attention to if your Mac is running slowly. If you find an app that is using an excessive amount of power, you can use an App Cleaner to delete them fully. Read an AppCleaner review to see if this could help you.
Turn Off Visual Effects
An easy way to speed up your Mac is to turn off the visual effects. These effects look great, but turning them off can make your Mac a lot more speedy. In your System Preferences, turn off opening applications animation and automatically hiding and showing of the Dock, and change Genie effect to Scale effect.
Reduce Desktop Clutter
Every icon on your desktop takes up RAM space. If you can have fewer icons on your desktop, your Mac will run faster. Spend some time tidying up your Desktop and reducing the number of icons. When your Desktop is decluttered, restart the computer to speed things up. Use the Desktop Stacks feature to let you put your icons in order, or you can just delete things to sort out the speed problem. Improve the speed to improve the performance of your computer.
Empty The Caches
Cache files are temporary data that are used to speed up the processes. For example, a web browser will cache web pages to download a website faster when you navigate to it. This is useful, but after a while, all those cache files start to clutter up the storage space on your Mac, causing your computer to slow down.
Download a cleaning utility to remove these cache files quickly and easily.
Clean Up Your Hard Drive
Cleaning your hard drive is the easiest and most effective way to improve the operating speed of your Mac. Spend some time looking through your hard drive and delete everything that is causing is run more slowly. Caches, logs, apps, widgets, undeleted trash files, and large files you don’t use are the best things to clear out to speed things up.
Replace Your HDD
There are also some hardware solutions to handle a slowing down Mac. You can help things to improve to replacing your original hard drive with a solid-state one. An SSD will speed up the computer allowing it to boot faster, and make the system much more efficient at multi-tasking.
It’s a good idea to speak to a professional before trying to upgrade the hardware yourself, as the process can be a bit challenging if you’re not used to working with the insides of a computer. Make a complete backup of your data before you replace your hard drive, so you can restore all your files if something does go wrong.
Manage Your Start-Up Items
A clean start-up goes a long way to speed up a Mac that has been running slowly. When your Mac is able to launch faster, it will do everything else faster too. Not waiting for everything to launch will save you a lot of time. When your Mac boots up, it runs a lot of apps, and a lot of those apps are ones you don’t need. In your System Preferences, you’ll find your Login Items in your account. You can deselect any program that you don’t need immediately when your Mac starts up.
Delete Browser Add-Ons
Your browser can slow down your Mac more than you’d think. Modern browsers are very complicated, and they can easily get overloaded with add-ons and extensions that you add onto them. These tools can be very useful, but they do reduce your browser speed. To stop this, remove any browser extensions that you don’t need, and keep the number of tabs that you have open to a minimum. Before installing a new add-on, think hard about if you actually need it, and are willing to pay for it with a drop in speed.
