Is it taking longer to boot up your Mac? Are you seeing the beach ball more often? Is your hard drive filling up? Want to learn how to speed up your Mac?
Prosoft Engineering has been developing for the Mac platform for over 25 years, so we’re experts on how the Mac works and best performs. First of all, there are several factors that can lead to a slower Mac, so we are going to focus on the top 5 culprits.
Too many startup applications
Too many processes and applications running at the same time
Hard drive is too full
Slow-Performing hardware
Fragmented hard drive
One of the most common issues of why Macs slow down is the applications that are being launched at startup. These applications or files that start instantly when you launch your Mac are a prime reason why your computer may be running slow. You can check which applications are being loading every time you turn on your Mac or restart it by going to: System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items You can either uncheck or delete the application that you do not want to load at startup. Startup applications should be set to a minimum. The more applications you allow at startup, the more time it will take to load these applications initially.
Most of the time, a computer starts to slow down because of different processes or applications that are running in the background. To check which processes are running and using a large amount of CPU, go to Activity Monitor and click the %CPU. This will show which application or process is running high on CPU usage. You can either terminate the processes and application or uninstall the application if it is not being used.*Note: Make sure you did your research in terminating processes since most of the processes are being used by the OS itself or another application. Refer to product support or go to their website for further information.
A Mac computer will start to slow down if you've already reach 80-90% capacity of the hard drive. Always make sure to keep an optimal 40-30% of free space on your hard drive.
Drive Genius offers an easy-to-use tool called DriveSlim™, that helps you free up more space on your Mac hard drive with Duplicate Files Search, Large Files Search and Universal Binary slimming.
One of the greatest things about DriveSlim™ is the built-in backup. This feature allows you to backup any and all files that you have marked for deletion in DriveSlim™. That way, you can save the files off to another location, in case you ever want those files back.
A very important factor to having a fast machine is knowing what kind of hard drive you have in it. Hard drives have all sorts of specifications and they have a broad range of speeds. Switching to a SSD (Solid State Drive) can be a costly upgrade, but it will definitely speed up your read/write times. Not only are SSD drives fast, they are also more rugged than a spinning hard drive. Knowing that all your important computer files reside on your hard drive, don’t you want to make sure you have a fast, reliable and durable drive? Adding RAM is also a very beneficial way to speed up your system. It is a good idea to max out your RAM. This will enable your Mac to run at its full ability. You will notice that the beach balling will go away. Prosoft recommends and is partnered with Other World Computing. The produce world-class products and have excellent pricing and technical support. Check out their latest, fastest drives here: OWC
Fragmentation occurs on a hard drive when there is not a block of free space large enough to contain the complete file. This causes the data to be split into separate pieces as it is written to the hard drive, which causes slower access time. When accessing the file, the hard drive has to search for each individual piece of data instead of accessing one large contiguous chunk. This affects all files, including system files and application files which can lead to slow boot times and slow application launches. Generally, to speed up a system, you need to ensure that your data is written to the hard drive in an organized manner. This can be done simply by running a defrag on your Mac within our software Drive Genius. Defragging is much more thorough than trying to copy all files to a new drive. Also, remember that OS X ONLY defrags files under 20MB, so you have a LOT of files over that size that are clogging up your drive with fragments…