Quick and Easy Ways to Speed up your Mac.

Whether it is an old Apple iMac, MacBook laptop or a new one, eventually it will start to slow down and take longer to bootup. the question is, why is my Mac running slow?

1. Keep Your Hard Drive Clean

Imagine your hard drive as an energy source! The more free space your hard drive has available, the more power it has to contribute to the speed and smoothness of running applications. The Mac’s operating system utilises free space in the HDD as ‘virtual memory’, used for general tasks like using applications. This is a very common solution for a slow running Mac. So free up that hard drive to make room for ‘virtual memory’.
• Remove those rarely used applications
• Empty out the trash bin often
• Transfer heavy loads of data to an external source
• Remove language files that are not used.

2. Clean Up Your Desktop

Upon powering up your laptop, your system will be using all available resources. This process is affected by the number of icons and files on your desktop. The desktop is the first screen that your system will load, therefore these files and icons will play a part in the time it takes your Mac to power up. Deleting or organising files into folders will speed up the process of powering up your Mac as it will be using fewer resources, ensuring a shorter boot time and improving general performance.
• Organise your desktop files into folders
• Delete unused desktop files
• Keep your desktop Clean and Tidy

3. Keep Your Activity Monitored

There are factors that hinder the speed of you Mac which are not easily recognised. Apple’s Activity Monitor is on hand to allow you to monitor your RAM (Random Access Memory), virtual memory usage, CPU usage along with more information to help to optimize your Mac!
A slow system can often be the result of applications eating up excessive memory, this is displayed within the activity monitor so you can pinpoint which applications are doing so! It’s up to you to minimise your usage depending on what applications you need to use to make room in your memory.

• Close down other applications when you’re not using them
• Minimize usage of selected applications
• Quit certain applications which are eating up your CPU

4. Manage Your Start-up Items

Many applications that you use will allow themselves to be booted up when you power up your Mac. This can be useful if you use a particular application regularly. It can also take its toll on the booting time for your system and be of no use to you as a user.
It will benefit your Mac’s performance if you remove those applications that are not used as often from start up items as they drain resources when booting your Mac. Follow these steps to allow you to select which start up items that you would like to remain active.
• System Preferences > System > Users & Groups > Login Items.

5. Make Use Of Cleaning Utility Tools

An effective way of boosting your Mac’s performance is through the use of multi function utility tools. This will allow you to clear temporary files stored as cashes that often hinder your Mac’s performance. These programs run ‘scheduled routines’ which will regularly check browser history, unnecessary files and many other cache files. This solution is highly recommended to optimize your Mac to achieving tip top performance.

These simple steps can make a real difference to the performance of your Mac, so why not give it a go?

We also like to mention that one of the most common reason for a slow Mac is its age and the capability to run the latest applications. If it is an old Mac, then it could also be a failing hard drive.

Tech Master Solutions offer iMac & MacBook repairs including hard drive replacements, whether it is a mechanical HDD or an SSD (Solid State Drive) we can upgrade your iMac hard drive.