Macs are without question great computers. They are robust, secure and sleek. The operating system piles up a lot of files, and this might affect the performance. By scheduling regular maintenance and tweaking, the operating system can be made to work fast. Here are some tips to speed up a Mac:
Trash should be cleared, and the desktop shouldn’t have a lot of icons and folders. Mac OS X treats each icon on the desktop as an open window. If there are a lot of icons on the desktop, the Mac is bound to have some performance issues.
After Dashboard was introduced in Tiger, developers have come up with thousands of widgets. Some widgets hog CPU cycles, and since they are always running, they utilize a lot of system resources. It is not a good idea to stack the Dashboard with widgets. If the OS has to be fast and responsive, all the available widgets should be killed.
Mac OS X utilizes the hard disk to page memory. If the hard disk is full, the operating system wouldn’t have space for virtual memory and the OS might not be responsive or become very slow.
When an application is deleted on Mac OS X, only the .app file is moved to the trash. There are other associated files like preference panes and supportive libraries that remain in the user’s root folder. If these files are not removed, the hard disk will run out of free space and operating system would have trouble scratching virtual memory. There are third party applications like AppZapper and TidyUp that can automate the process. These applications are safe to use and would not delete any of the core files.
Macs have cooling problems, the portables especially. If the processor gets hot, the system slows down. Since Apple has limited the internal fan speed to 1500 rpm, tools like Fan Control can be used to tweak the fan speed and bring it up to 6500 rpm. Such speed drastically cool down the processor, and the processor doesn’t slow down. But increasing the fan speed shortens the battery life a bit.
Since Mac OS X is UNIX based, there are ‘Permissions’ set to every folder. The permissions, sometimes get corrupt or jumbled up and may make the OS slow or even make the applications unresponsive. To repair permissions, the Disk Utility should be invoked, and hard drive should set to be repaired. The process is automated, and it might take a while, depending upon the used disk space.
These simple steps would drastically improve the performance of Macs.