This is a list of ways for you to easily boost your Mac’s performance. Some ideas were taken from other lists, and some are improved variations of existing methods.
1. Get rid of those login items. If you don’t use them, then begone with them. You can check what you have as your login items by going to: System Preferences>Accounts>Login Items. Seriously, this really cuts the lag of your computer, especially when starting up.
2. Look at the Other section of your System Preferences. If you don’t use those prefpanes, then disable them, or simply delete them. Also, Universal Access uses up precious RAM, so if you don’t use it, disable it in the System Preferences. Other things that you might not use is Internet Sharing, Speech Recognition, and Bluetooth. If you don’t, turn them off!
3. Macs come with lots of languages available for use. Like, LOTS of languages. As in odds are you’ll only be using one or two out of the available hundred something languages. Get rid of them, you save up a lot of Hard Drive space. A good app for this task is Monolingual.
4. Clean out all of that useless junk. Look, sooner or later, your Hard Disk will get full. I know, I’ve been there. Many, many times. Look for apps or files which you don’t need/use. Believe me, when you delete 4 GB of space in one go, you begin to feel a much faster load.
5. Run maintenance checks on your computer! Lots of computers slow down (and lose memory space) because they don’t have their cache cleaned out! Run maintenance apps such as MainMenu, or Onyx to clean out your cache, and to verify and repair disk permissions.
6. Widgets. Man oh man, widgets. Even if your dashboard is hidden, widgets will take up RAM. I emptied out most of my active widgets. Now, I only keep three running. Believe me, this helps. If you don’t use dashboard, then simply disable it with an application like MainMenu, Onyx, or TinkerTool.
7. Periodially check your Activity Monitor, which is located in the Utilities folder. See if there’s something that’s suckin up the RAM, yet your not using it. If there is, deactivate it.
8. Finally, if you really want your Mac to be powered up, and battery life is of no concern to you, then go to System Preferences>Energy Saver>Options and set your processor performance to Highest.
With these eight steps, your Mac will most definitely perform better. Always be sure to run maintenance checks every now and then, and check the Activity Monitor too!
Filed under: How To, Productivity, System/Disk Utilities, Tips
[...] How to: Optimize your Mac’s performance in just eight simple steps This is a list of ways for you to easily boost your Mac’s performance. Some ideas were taken from other lists, […] [...]
Your #1 could be true but for me, having it ON all the time, makes it even more convincing for me that I am MAC person. I’ll keep it as is.
I love widgets but shocked that it eats a lot of RAM as well even it looks as if “disabled”. I’m new with Mac so that’s good to know.
Are these downloads for free? Thanks for the advise.
I’m pretty sure all of the downloads available on this are for free. Widgets also, are free, you can find widgets at http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
Good luck with your Mac
thanks for the info, but my macbook pro 2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo is fast enough… monolingual is really nice app, thanks…
It might be fast enough, but can always be even faster