People who have worked with Windows in the past may be familiar with the process of weeding out unnecessary processes and applications in order to optimize the performance of their system.
While Macs don’t tend to be as cluttered out of the box, there are still ways to improve the performance of your Mac that aren’t terribly complicated, and which are easy enough for any user to do.
This is even more true for users who have had their Mac for a while and might have allowed it to be bogged down somewhat by little things here and there.
Hardware Upgrades
The best way to improve your Mac’s performance without sacrificing anything in the way of functionality or style is to add extra RAM. Simply put, the more RAM you have, the faster your Mac will work. RAM is relatively inexpensive nowadays, but you’ll still definitely notice a significant difference if you upgrade to the maximum amount that your machine will allow.
Hard disk space also affects the speed of a Mac. This may not be immediately obvious, especially to recent converts from Windows, but since Macs rely heavily upon Virtual Memory – which is essentially hard disk space used as though it were RAM, in layman’s terms – you can guarantee continued performance by making sure that you always have plenty of extra hard disk space. Conversely, if hard disk space becomes scarce, you’ll find that the performance of your machine begins to suffer.
Disabling Unnecessary Features
On most Macs, you’ll find that many different applications are running in the background, often performing functions that are of purely cosmetic use, or even of no use to you at all. You can reclaim a major portion of your Mac’s processing power by disabling these processes.
The first thing to do is to take care of your startup items, which are the processes that begin as soon as you start up your machine. These can be found in Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. To disable items you don’t use or need, click the item, then click the “minus” sign at the bottom of the menu. Some of these things do perform important functions, so make sure to leave any critical ones running. If you’re not sure what any of these do, simply Google the name and you should be able to find information on what it is and whether or not it’s safe to disable it.
In System Preferences, you can also deactivate features like Voice Recognition if you don’t use them. In the Dock menu under System Preferences, there are various animations that you can also safely turn off, which will save you additional system resources.
Optimization Apps
There are some pieces of software available that will safely remove certain unnecessary features, thus speeding up your Mac. These include Drive Genius 3 – a great program that will identify unnecessary files that are clogging and filling up your hard drive and increase the speed of your Mac.
These are some simple steps you can take which will have a huge effect on the performance of your Mac. Just try them, and you’ll see the difference.
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